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New faculty profile: Physicist Suzuki joins MSE
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Yuri
Suzuki returned to her roots when she joined the Berkeley
faculty. Her physicist father Mahiko has been on the physics
department faculty since she was three.
ANGELA PRIVIN PHOTO |
MSE Professor Yuri Suzuki is part engineer, part farmer. Her
research expertise involves "growing" new materials
that might one day shrink computers to minuscule proportions and
help them achieve mind-boggling speeds. She doesn’t use
organic materials like conventional farmers, but combines varying
quantities and mixes of magnetic oxides to produce materials with
properties that don’t now exist.
The 35-year-old physicist joined the Berkeley faculty in spring
2003 after five years on the faculty at Cornell University. Becoming
a Berkeley engineering professor was a homecoming for Suzuki,
who grew up just down the street from her Hearst Mining office.
Her father, Mahiko Suzuki, has been teaching theoretical physics
in Berkeley’s physics department since his daughter was
three.
At first, Suzuki wasn’t interested in going into the same
field as her father, but a dynamic undergraduate college professor
at Harvard stoked her interest in physics. She got her Ph.D. in
applied physics, specializing in high-temperature superconductors,
at Stanford, where she began studying the properties of new materials.
During her post-doctorate work at Bell Labs she focused on magnetism
and the properties of oxides and has been working in that field
ever since.
The addition of Suzuki doubles the number of women faculty in
the MSE department, from one to two. While she was the only woman
in the MSE department at Cornell, she says she hardly noticed.
"It wasn’t at all hard being the only woman,"
Suzuki says. "What was tough was being the youngest person
in the department." Her goal at Berkeley is to interact with
its outstanding cohort of faculty and students and explore new
research directions in photonics and optics. This sort of interdisciplinary
collaboration is a great way for her to perform innovative research
in fields she hasn’t studied in depth, she explains.
Suzuki’s method of growing materials involves pulverizing
magnetic oxides like iron oxide and lanthanum manganese oxide
and pressing them into puck-shaped pellets. A high-powered ultraviolet
laser is then used to vaporize the pellet material into thin films
in a controlled high-pressure, low-temperature environment.
Finer than a strand of human hair, these thin films contain an
atomically ordered blend of the magnetic oxide materials. With
very different properties than their bulk counterparts, these
materials may potentially serve as building blocks for future
magnetic storage devices and media and may provide new functionality
that silicon, optics, and metal alloys don’t have.
In five to ten years, Suzuki says, the new cultivated materials
could enable a nonvolatile random access memory (RAM) that doesn’t
wipe clean every time a computer is turned off, as well as more
sensitive computer read heads that would permit the use of denser
hard drives.
by Angela Privin, Engineering Public Affairs
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