This award supports Professor Arthur J. Freeman of Northwestern University to continue an ongoing joint study of the electronic structure of solid materials with Professors Adolf Neckel and Raimund Podloucky of the Department of Physical Chemistry of the University of Vienna and Professor Peter Weinberger, Institute of Technical Electrochemistry, Technical University of Vienna. The collaborating electronic structure theory groups at these universities have been actively involved in the development of highly sophisticated, fully self consistent local density computer codes for the calculation of the electronic structures of bulk solids, surfaces and alloys. They have also been calculating from first principles spin polarized photocur- rents which are of special interest to a recently established NSF- funded Materials Research Group (MRG) on the Magnetic Properties of Materials. The Northwestern group brings extensive experience in the calculation of the electronic structure of thin films and the two Austrian groups offer capabilities to perform calculations of the intensity of angle resolved photoemission and inverse photoemission. They will use these computational methods to investigate jointly a wide range of phenomena, including the magnetic properties of surfaces, interfaces, chemisorbed overlayers on surfaces, and the spin polarized photocurrents of interest to the experimental members of the MRG. They are also interested in pursuing studies of the role of oxygen disorder in the properties of the new high temperature superconductors. The new Materials Research Group is centered on an experimental program to use advanced spin-sensitive spectroscopic techniques and advanced state of the art electronic structure calculations in a coordinated program of research on magnetism and magnetic materials. A key factor in the ability of the Northwestern group to calculate spin-polarized photocurrents has been the Austrian-US exchange program. It has permitted the development of software for exploiting the powerful thin film capabilities developed at Northwestern and has also contributed to research on photoemission from high temperature superconductors.
