Materials for Spin Electronics: Neutrons as a Fundamental Probe.

[Chris Marrows]

Materials for Spin Electronics: Neutrons as a Fundamental Probe.

Announcement and Call for Abstracts

14th and 15th January 2002, The Cosener's House, Abingdon, UK.

Organisers: C. H. Marrows (Leeds) and S. Langridge (ISIS)

http://www.stoner.leeds.ac.uk/neutron.htm

This two day workshop is to discuss the use of neutron techniques
in the burgeoning field of spin electronics, and is supported by
the EU Neutron Roundtable. There is currently an enormous
worldwide drive to develop devices where the spin of the electron
is used to store or process information, either in addition to or
instead of the charge. Although many devices designs have been put
forward, finding materials with which to implement them is a
significant experimental challenge. There are two main areas of
activity - developing heterostructures with magnetic components,
such as spin-valves and magnetic tunnel junctions, and also the
search for materials with desirable properties such as
half-metallicity. Neutrons are a natural probe of these materials
as it is possible to obtain a wide variety of magnetic
information, such as alignments of layers, information on magnetic
disorder obtained though diffuse scatter, and magnetic excitations
through inelastic techniques.

A particularly important aspect of the meeting is an attempt to
widen the potential user base for neutron methods - a large number
of academic and industrial laboratories work on preparing and
characterising the materials that either are used or are intended
to be used in spin electronic devices, however the number of
groups who also make use of the unique information that neutrons
and muons can provide represent only a small fraction of these.

Invited speakers will include H. Zabel (Bochum), P. J. van der
Zaag (Philips) and others.

If you wish to attend please send an email to
neutrons at phy.leeds.ac.uk by 14th December 2001. Abstracts for
contributed talks in any area relevant to the meeting are also
sought, please send not more than 1000 words in Word, ASCII or TeX
format files to neutrons at phy.leeds.ac.uk by the same date.

The meeting will be held at the CCLRC conference facility, the
Cosener's House, in Abingdon, close to Oxford and the UK neutron
source ISIS. Information about the venue can be found at
http://www.cclrc.ac.uk/Activity/ACTIVITY=CosenersHouse. The
nearest airport is London Heathrow, and we will arrange ground
transportation in the form of a coach transfer if there is sufficient
demand from international participants.

There is no registration fee for this meeting. Accommodation on
the night of the 14th January can be provided free of charge for a
limited number of participants (roughly thirty) from EU countries.
There will also be small bursaries towards the cost of travel to
Abingdon to assist PhD students from EU countries who wish to
present their work. If you fall into this category please include
the title of your thesis, the year you intend to graduate and an
estimate of the likely cost of travel to Abingdon by the most
economical route.
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  Dr Chris Marrows      
  Dept of Physics & Astronomy,  E.C.Stoner Laboratory,
  University of Leeds, Leeds. LS2 9JT  UK
  Phone : +44 (0)113 2333780   Fax  : +44 (0)113 2333846  
  http://www.stoner.leeds.ac.uk
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