Advances in modern technology are tightly linked to the discovery of materials that provide new or superior properties compared to existing ones. The vast knowledge of existing materials, their corresponding properties, and our emerging understanding of the connection between the positions of atoms in materials and the properties they possess allows researchers to more skillfully design new materials with sought after properties. The pace of progress between implementing design ideas that are believed to lead to superior materials and the actual discovery of superior materials is crucially dependent on feedback on the actual atomic structure and properties of the materials made. With such feedback the validity of materials design ideas is verified or denied, providing knowledge that can be acted upon in refined attempts to make superior materials. The equipment made possible by this grant is an important element of the path to accelerate the discovery of magnetic materials. It is also useful to identifying new superconductors as superconductors expel magnetic fields, which this equipment measures with a 100-fold increase in sensitivity compared to existing instruments at Cornell University currently being used for this purpose. These more sensitive and accurate magnetic measurements will also aid scientists using Cornell's national user facility supported by the NSF known as PARADIM in their quest to discover new magnetic materials and new superconductors. PARADIM's mission is to accelerate the discovery of inorganic materials. The enhanced sensitivity of the equipment made possible by this grant is vital to PARADIM's focus on "interface materials," where magnetic effects can originate from a single layer of atoms within a sample containing typically millions of atomic layers. The broader impact of the new instrument includes the training of students and its accessibility to the broad community of researchers within Cornell as well as users from across the nation that come to discover new inorganic materials in PARADIM.
The support of this grant enables Cornell University to acquire a Quantum Design Magnetic Property Measurement System (MPMS) to characterize and investigate the magnetic properties of materials. The higher sensitivity of the new MPMS - 100 fold greater than Cornell's existing PPMS systems - will facilitate the investigation of entirely new classes of materials, including atomically thin and interfacial systems, which are currently out of reach, and accelerate the discovery of superior electronic/magnetic materials for researchers from academia, national labs, and industry from across the country. The new instrument will be housed at the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR), whose two general-purpose instruments (Quantum Design PPMS) can characterize magnetic properties, but their limited sensitivity restricts the type of magnetic materials to be investigated. The addition of the MPMS will accelerate materials discovery, which is the mission of the recently NSF-funded national user facility headquartered at Cornell known as the Platform for the Accelerated Realization, Analysis, and Discovery of Interface Materials (PARADIM), an NSF Materials Innovation Platform. This MPMS will also greatly enhance the ability of Cornell researchers in areas ranging from spintronics, superconductivity, and two-dimensional materials, to electronic and magnetic devices, impacting the productivity of 19 faculty members across 4 departments and 2 colleges, as well as one of the interdisciplinary research groups (IRGs) of the NSF-MRSEC at Cornell, which is focused on spin manipulation of materials for next-generation magnetic memories and devices.
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.
