Marie Curie IRSES Project: NANOMAG - Magnetic Nanoparticles and Thin Films for Spintronic Applications and High Performance Permanent Magnets

In full compliance with the European R&D policy and the FP7-PEOPLE-2011-IRSES Call Work Programme, the basic objective and scope of this Marie Curie Action is to improve the research potential in the field of advanced multifunctional nano-structured magnetic materials and technologies for novel spintronic, magnetic storage and biomedical applications at European level, through collaboration and exchange of staff among six prominent European Union Institutes and Universities with three world-class laboratories from USA and the Republic of Korea. The EU Institutes and Universities are: (i) the Institute of Materials Science at Demokritos (Athens - Greece), (ii) the CNR (Rome-Italy), (iii) the Josef Stefan Institute (Ljubljana-Slovenia), (iv) the Department of Macromolecular Physics at the Faculty of Physics of the Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) (Poznan-Polland), (v) the Department of Materials Engineering at the University of Ioannina (Ioannina-Greece) and (vi) University of Cyprus (Nicosia-Cyprus). The out of Europe partners are: (i) the University of Florida (USA), (ii) the University of Delaware (USA), (iii) the University of Texas (USA)and (iv) the Korea Basic Science Institute (KBSI). The project will be mainly focused on the synthesis and characterization of rare earth/transition metal oxide nanoparticles and thin films, and their hybrids with organic Molecule based Magnets (MbM) and Single Molecule Magnets (SMM). These materials will be used as fundamental blocks to fabricate: (i) novel spintronic devices (such as spin valves/tunnel junctions). There have been intensive efforts internationally, devoted to develop room temperature spin polarized magnetic materials and also to incorporate both inorganic semiconductors and carbon-based materials as the spin transporting channels. The importance of this Research Field is evident by the fact that current read-heads of hard disk storage operate with tunnel junctions (also basis for MRAM - new type of non-volatile memory). (ii) Novel high performance Permanent Magnets: The next generation of high performance Permanent Magnets with energy products two times greater than those of the best currently available magnets (over 800 KJ/m3 ~100 MGOe) will be investigated in this project. The energy product, (BH)max, is the standard figure of merit used for permanent magnets and reflects the energy available for use in applications. The higher the (BH)max the smaller the volume of the magnet needed for a particular application. Therefore, for miniaturized and more efficient devices, high performance magnets are needed. These magnets also find uses in a wide range of commercial and military applications, for the generation and distribution of electrical power, as well as in the electronic and automobile industries, communications, information technologies and automatic control engineering. The demand for high energy magnets is great for greener, more efficient, energy uses such as wind turbines and hybrid/more-electric cars and planes. (iii) Copolymer dressed magnetic nanoparticles for biomedical applications, such as cancer diagnosis and treatment: iron/iron-oxide based nanoparticles, composed of a nanosize magnetic core coated with new stealth polymers for cancer diagnosis (as MRI contrast agents) and treatment (magnetic hyperthermia of tumors) will be fabricated and studied.