Transcript University of Minnesota - Materials Research Science and

MRSEC-wide industrial education/outreach activities
• MRSEC contributions to education involving the industrial sector
• Undergraduate/graduate/postdoc collaborating with industry
• Lifelong learning and skill building for industrial scientists and engineers
• Challenges: intellectual property, retention of technical contacts
• Best practices vary by research area
MRSEC Industrial Partners (358 total)
Small (< $10 million): 102
Medium (> $10 - $100 million): 69
Survey years: 2002-2004
18 of 27 MRSECs reporting (November 2004)
Large (> $100 million): 187
MRSEC-wide industrial education/outreach activities
• Survey years: 2002 - 2004
• 90 workshops and symposia involving more than 3600 industrial participants
• Collaborative research with industry
- 93 MRSEC undergraduates
- 228 graduate students/postdocs
• Effective leveraging and two-way knowledge exchange
• Early student exposure to the industrial sector
• Most students supported by a combination of MRSEC and industrial funds
Graduate students and postdocs performing collaborative
research with industrial partners(228 total)
Spintronics and Information Technology
An Electronic Pump for Nuclear Spins
• Magnetics Heterostructures IRG at the University of Minnesota
• A spin-based storage information device that combines a material ordinarily used for information storage (iron) with a
common semiconductor (gallium arsenide).
• Significant advance: electron spin - the property that carries information - is retained when it passes into the
semiconductor.
• Ordinarily this information, often referred to as spin polarization, decays in roughly one-billionth of a second.
• In this new device the electrons transfer their spin to the nuclei that form the cores of atoms in the semiconductor.
• Unlike the electrons, the nuclei can retain their spin for many minutes, after which their spin can be read by electrons.
• This type of read/write device therefore can allow nuclear spin to be used as a processing element in computer.
• [J. Strand et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 91, 036602 (2003).]
Spin-polarized electrons (orange spheres) tunnel
through the barrier separating ferromagnetic iron
(orange) from a semiconductor (gray). Once inside the
semiconductor, the electrons transfer their spin to nuclei
(gray spheres).
University of Minnesota MRSEC
Polymersomes: Tough Vesicles Made from Diblock Copolymers
• A joint effort between the University of Minnesota and University of Pennsylvania MRSECs
• Giant “polymersomes” 10x tougher than lipid vesicles
• Less permeable to water than typical phospholipid bilayers
• Storage vehicles for reagents; candidates for targeted drug delivery
Amphiphilic block copolymer
= lipid-like bilayer
Vesicle immediately after
electroformation
After encapsulation of 10-kD
Texas Red-labeled dextran
Science, 1999, 284, 1143