9501195 Chien A variety of artificially structured materials composed of multilayers and granular solids will be fabricated by multi-source sputter deposition and pulsed laser deposition, and characterized by x-ray diffraction, transmission electron microscopy, and other techniques. The superconducting/magnetic multilayers are designed to reveal newly found phenomena and proximity effects. The giant magneto-transport properties of granular and multilayer systems will be studied to capture the intricate physics. A variety of unconventional magnetic multilayers are intended to probe interlayer coupling, the role of amorphous constituent layers, and the behavior of metal-insulator systems. These are problems of current interest, many of them also have technological importance in high-density magnetic storage and magnetoresistive read-out devices. %%% This proposal focuses on a variety of artificially structured materials composed of multilayers and granular solids, where the layer thickness or the particle diameter is only about 100 billionths of an inch. These new materials, fabricated by advanced processing methods, exhibit a host of new and novel properties that are unavailable in ordinary materials. Of particular interest are the superconducting properties, the giant magnetoresistance behavior, and the coupling between magnetic layers. These properties have relevance in applications of superconductors in magnetic fields, high density magnetic storage, and magnetoresistive read-out technology. ***
