Eom joins faculty

Chang-Beom Eom, formerly an associate professor of materials science and physics at Duke University, recently joined our faculty. At UW-Madison, he adds a new research dimension — synthesizing and characterizing complex oxide films — to materials science.

"Sometimes we work on existing material that has never been synthesized in thin-film form," says Eom. "Some materials exist in bulk ceramic form, but we are looking at thin-film form that has almost perfect atomic arrangement."

Eom explores these materials in thicknesses smaller than one hundreth the diameter of a human hair and says the challenges are synthesizing and understanding material properties in such a small scale.

Materials scientists face these challenges because the devices in which their creations are used also are shrinking, Eom says. Take the computer chip: Forty years ago, single computers filled giant rooms; today, we can put a billion transistors on a centimeter-square microchip.

Eom also researches ferromagnetic oxides in a relatively new field called spintronics. The field exploits not only an electron's electrical charge, but also its spin direction, for use in such devices as transistors, semiconductors, memory units and sensors.