This award supports the acquisition of a Magnetic Properties Measurement System (MPMS), a high-magnetic-field, measurement system for measuring the magnetic properties of various material, geological, and chemical specimens at Johns Hopkins University. This MPMS is a versatile instrument that can measure a wide range of material systems with a high sample throughput rate. This instrument will support a large and active research effort in condensed matter physics, materials science, geophysics, and magnetism of chemical species at Johns Hopkins University. Acquisition of the MPMS system will significantly enhance current research programs and enable new research directions at Johns Hopkins. The proposed instrument will enhance the research training of the approximately twelve postdoctoral fellows and twenty graduate students directly involved in the proposed research. As the instrument will be made available to the broader Johns Hopkins research community, its impact on research training will grow with time. The instrument will also benefit undergraduate and graduate laboratory courses, and the extensive education outreach programs focusing on materials research that are already in place at Johns Hopkins for high school students, high school teachers, and undergraduates. The MPMS will also support work going on in the NSF funded PARADIM program.
This award is for the acquisition of a Magnetic Properties Measurement System (MPMS) for measuring the magnetic properties of various material, geological, and chemical specimens at Johns Hopkins University. The instrument is based on a low-temperature cryostat, an integrated superconducting magnet and a superconducting quantum interference device (a "SQUID"). The proposed system has a magnet that can apply magnetic fields up to 7 Tesla to a variable temperature sample chamber. Temperature capabilities beyond the standard T = 1.8 to 400 K, necessary for much of the proposed science, will be provided by a sample space oven, allowing up to T = 800 K, and a helium three insert option, allowing low temperature measurements down to T = 0.3 K. The work will include experiments that spans a wide range of scientific areas, including probing correlated electron systems, nanomagnets and superconducting nanostructures, new superconductors, magnetism in quasi-two-dimensional organic conductors, synthesis and assembly of magnetic nanomaterials, and investigations of analogs of heme- and non-heme metalloenzymes.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
