Visiting Fellowship for Professor A. Taraphder: Theory of magnetism with temporal disorder applied to magnetically doped ZnO

We need to understand a new class of magnetic materials, magnetic semiconductors, because they have a very high potential in a new subject called spintronics. These materials have the potential to perform both the functions of a semiconductor to process data and a magnetic to store the data.The particular class of compounds based ZnO with a small amount of a transition metal added is particularly promising because they are ferromagnetic at room temperature.However there is a major puzzle: sometimes the magnetism is enhanced when more impurities are added and sometimes the magnetism goes away.In this project we shall investigate if a particular mechanism for this is valid. Understanding this aspect of the magnets will be a very important step towards being able to optimise them for use in spintronics devices. This project is to bring an excellent Indian physicist, Professor Taraphder, to Sheffield to work with the leader of the main UK group working on ZnO in order to solve this problem.