Abstract

My group investigates and engineers strong correlations between ferroic orders in artificial and intrinsic multiferroics, materials with more than one ferroic order, specifically to couple ferroelectric and magnetic orders (magnetoelectricity), and demonstrated the electric field control of magnetism. Here I will discuss the advances we have made in magneto electric switching using exchange and strain based multiferroic materials to realize unprecedented magneto electric transduction in device compatible geometries. We find that magneto electric switching is orders of magnitude more energy efficient than spin torques and lead to projected energy dissipation per operation at device scale to be in the 10’s of attojoules.

Biography

John Heron was awarded B.S. from UC Santa Barbara in 2007 where he studied magnetic semiconductors in the lab of Prof. David Awschalom. For masters and Ph.D. degrees (awarded in 2011 and 2013), he investigated magneto electric switching of thin film BiFeO₃ under the mentorship of Prof. Ramamoorthy Ramesh at UC Berkeley. Heron received the Ross N. Tucker award for superior work and scholarship in the characterization, development and/or use of semiconductor, magnetic, optical or electronic materials by a graduate student or students pursuing such areas of inquiry at the University of California, Berkeley in 2013.  As a postdoc in the lab of Prof. Schlom, Heron investigated magneto electric switching in novel composite multiferroic heterostructures. Since Jan. 2016, John Heron is now Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan.

Seminar sponsored by the Department of Electrical Engineering