Assistant Professor of Physics
Sergei Urazhdin | West Virginia University
From Ice Cream to Microwaves
Sergei Urazhdin's notion of nanoscience doesn't rule out having some fun.
Mostly, he designs new nanotools and runs a West Virginia University research program on spintronics, the kind of electronics that makes use not only of the electron charge but also of its spin. Spintronic devices may become central to the future of hard drives, cellphones and whatever comes after the IPod.
But tearing such things apart is fine with him -- if it draws children toward nanoscience.
His summer program for 20 of some of America's poorest rural children let them dismantle some old computers, to see the kind of inner materials that Urazhdin hopes to improve with his research. They also built rockets, learned how real forensic experts solve crimes, took their own footprints, and used biometrics to figure out whose was whose, made ice cream and learned how to make smoke bombs. In short, they had a ball.
To hear him talk, it's clear why he wistfully recalls when he had time to kayak the Cheat River and explore the serene nature far from Morgantown, and to play tennis, racquetball and volleyball. Now, he says, his sport is biking to work, and surviving the city traffic. That is, of course, after getting some rest from his summer camp.
His first summer workshop at West Virginia University, with Urazhdin as the leader, aimed to draw students to undergraduate and graduate research, and promote diversity by pulling the rural West Virginia populations into the WVNano Initiative for education in nanoscale science and engineering. As soon as the workshop ended, he was back in his lab, devising new spintronic nanodevices.
His team studies the behavior of nanoscale magnets, which he hopes will be put to use in the latest devices for information storage called magnetoresistive random access memory, or MRAM. MRAM, he says, stores data in the device's magnetic state, offering fast and efficient writing to a memory device and reading from it -- and most important the memory is stable, even when the power is off. The memory does not need to be refreshed every microsecond as with the devices used today. But to make spintronic devices useful, researchers need to better understand the properties of nanoscale magnets, and devise efficient ways to control their behaviors.
For a decade, magnetism and the properties of electron spin have been central topics for researchers who see potentials in nanoscale magnetic structures. Related research won the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance.
Urazhdin joined the physics department in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in 2005, after receiving a Ph.D. from Michigan State University, where his team was one of the first to figure out how to make nanostructures that can be eventually used as MRAM.
He had earned a master's degree in Russia, at Rostov State University, studying X-ray spectroscopy, and did postdoctoral work at Johns Hopkins.
"It is very exciting to be pursuing fundamental physics of nanoscale magnets, and at the same time know that my findings have direct practical implications for real devices," Urazhdin said.
