NSF funding will be used to support the participation of US scientists to a workshop on spintronic materials, "Workshop on Spin Transport in Solids", that will be held in Beijing, China. The main objective of the workshop is to provide an interactive forum for leading researchers to present and discuss their most recent findings, to afford a platform for graduate and post-doctoral students, primarily from China, to describe their progress in verbal and poster format, and to allow scientists, both young and mature, to have informal and in depth discussion with one another. The scientific scope ranges from novel materials, including concentrated and diluted magnetic semiconductors, to semiconductor device structures, to techniques to probe spin dynamics and to the description, both experimental and theoretical, of spin motion in non-magnetic materials. The broader impacts of the workshop range from providing an international experience to junior researchers to stimulate networking of US scientists with Chinese investigators.
This award for travel support to Beijing, China, was granted to permit participation of invited speakers and students from the United States at a workshop on "Spin Transport in Solids" which grew out of the joint desire of the principals of an existing Materials World Network NSF program on spin transport in semiconductors to disseminate information regarding progress in that field of study. Professor Jianhua Zhao of the State Key Laboratory for Superlattices and Microstructures, Institute of Semiconductors, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the strategic partner in the Materials World Network program with its US counterparts, S von Molnár and Peng Xiong. This workshop was organized by her and her staff in Beijing in concert with von Molnár and Xiong and took place in August 2011. The workshop was meant to increase participation in "Spintronics", a most important subfield of condensed matter which addresses the challenges of utilizing electron spin in addition to charge to produce new functionalities in modern electronics. Toward that end measures of the success of the workshop are the following: 1) Seventeen international invited speakers from China, Japan, Poland, Germany, France, and the United States of America. 2) Three oral contributions from PhD students, including one from the USA. 3) Fifteen posters by international faculty and students 4) Over one hundred participants. Thus the purpose of the workshop, to present new findings and to exchange scientific information and ideas among an international group of scientists and students was amply satisfied.
