This grant will support participation of US based students in the 2010 International Conference on Highly Frustrated Magnetism (HFM2010) to be held at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD in Aug. 2010. While conventional magnetic materials feature perfect ordering of atomic magnetic dipole moments, such order does not always occur. The geometry of the crystalline lattice and the range and nature of the interactions between magnetic dipole moments can disfavor long range order and lead to "Frustrated Magnetism." The corresponding materials have very unusual physical properties which are of deep fundamental interest and hold potential for applications. Research on frustrated magnetism relies on close collaboration between a variety of physical scientists. HFM2010 will draw new talent to the field and establish new collaborations to address the scientific challenges. For students and post docs, HFM2010 will provide a view into the excitement of this cutting edge research facilitated at the beginning of the meeting by a tutorial from top experts. To keep the cost of student/post doc participation down, affordable lodging is provided in Johns Hopkins dorm rooms. The NSF grant will fund reduced registration fees for US based students and provide travel support for early career invited speakers.
Frustration is an all too familiar part of our human existence. It turns out that frustration can also afflict magnetic materials but rather than despair, it can lead to qualitatively new materials properties of great fundamental and applied interest. Over the last several years, a worldwide community of scientists have been examining known frustrated magnets and pursuing new materials that expose the varied effects of frustration and competing interactions in materials. The International Conference on Highly Frustrated Magnetism is a biennial meeting to exchange ideas and form new collaborations amongst scientists working in this area. The 2010 meeting was held in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore MD from August 1-6, 2010 with partial funding from the NSF. A number of presentations at the meeting described experiments and theory revealing magnetic monopoles in so-called spin-ice. Magnetic monopoles are the magnetic equivalent of electric charge. While magnetic monopoles have not been found as fundamental particles in nature, it turns out that a certain rearrangement of atomic dipole moments in spin-ice (a topological excitation) can behave exactly as a magnetic monopole. A second focus of the meeting, were materials that realize so-called quantum spin liquids. These may form the basis for new forms of superconductivity and might also be of use for information storage and information processing. If you are interested in learning more, most of the talks at the HFM 2010 conference are accessible in video format at http://physics-astronomy.jhu.edu/hfm2010/program.html. NSF support for this conference helped to encourage the participation of younger scientists. Students and post docs presented most of the posters during two poster sessions and had the opportunity to experience first hand the intense interdisciplinary and international nature of cutting edge materials research. The next conference on highly frustrated magnetism, which will surely contain the exciting new results of collaborations and discussions started at the Baltimore meeting, will be held in Ontario, Canada in 2012.
