Professor Jianping Wang

Project Title: 
The Search for New Magnetic Materials for Permanent Magnet and Spintronic Applications

This group is using MSI for two projects, both related to the search and study of new magnetic materials:

  • The development of Fe-N based permanent magnets. The high demand for permanent magnets for clean energy applications and the geopolitical issues of rare-earth (RE) elements make it a priority to develop RE-free magnets. This group has taken a lead in the study of iron nitride magnets and demonstrated the great potential of Fe16N2. To facilitate the design of Fe-N based RE-free permanent magnets, understanding the electronic structure and magnetic properties of Fe16N2 is important. To this end, the researchers are performing density functional theory (DFT) calculations, which will allow them to understand, at the atomic level, the intrinsic properties of Fe16N2, as well as the effects of various engineering factors such as strain, doping, vacancy. In addition to the electronic structure calculations, they are also performing micromagnetic and Monte-Carlo simulations to design high-performance magnets. The simulations are important to guide the experiment, and help explain some experimental observations. 
  • Study of new topological insulators for spintronic applications. Spin-orbital torque (SOT) has demonstrated great capabilities for efficient switching of ferromagnetic layers and is one of the most promising device prototytes in spintronics. Topological insulators (TI) intrinsically have large spin-orbital coupling, thus are suitable for SOT devices. The group is working on growing new TI materials. To facilitate the experimental work, they carry out DFT calculations to predict whether a material is topological, and if so, whether it is suitable for SOT devices. This work requires many band structure calculations.

 

Project Investigators

Researcher Onri Jay Benally
Andrew DeRuiter
Brahmdutta Dixit
Matthew Hopper
Mohamad Ibrahim
Riyan Mendonsa
Peter Stoeckl
Przemyslaw Swatek
Denis Tonini Sr
Professor Jianping Wang
Jianxin Zhu
 
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