Our laboratory's research focuses on two major areas: fundamental understanding of nanostructured magnetic materials and developing nanostructured magnetic materials for biomedical appplications.
Nanostructured Materials
'Nanostructured' (NS) describes materials with length scales from 1-100 nm. This class of materials may include small particles, multilayered and thin film materials, or bulk materials with nanometer-sized grains. NS materials often have unique electrical, chemical, structural and magnetic properties, with potential applications including: information storage, color imaging, bioprocessing, magnetic refrigeration and ferrofluids. All of these materials share the common property that a significant fraction (up to 50%) of the sample volume is composed of grain boundaries and interfaces, collectively called the 'inter phase'. The magnetic properties are dominated by the presence of the interphase and the role of the interphase in interparticle coupling. Most real systems exhibit contributions from both coupling and reduced size. Nanostructured magnets have a broad variety of applications, including ferrofluids, magnetic recording and permanent magnets.
Biomedical Applications
The overview gives a summary of our work using magnetic nanoparticles for magnetic targeting of therapeutic agents, such as drugs or genes, to a specific spot on the body. Our laboratory is investigating high-moment magnetic nanoparticles that could offer improved magnetic targeting properties.
Disordered Magnetism
Inhomogeneity on the nanometer scale leads to interesting magnetic properties. The overview explains our work to understand how atomic-level disorder manifests itself in extrinsic magnetic properties.