Illinois to host WUN International Conference on Spintronic Materials and Technology

Following conferences in England in 2007 and China in 2008, the third WUN International Conference on Spintronic Materials and Technology (WUN-SPIN10) will be hosted in Urbana, June 21-23, 2010, at the Beckman Institute.

ECE and Physics Professor Jean-Pierre Leburton has been involved with the Worldwide University Network (WUN) since 2005 when the WUN spintronics program was established. WUN was created in 1999 as a multilateral partnership among universities over the world to solve challenging problems in many scientific and societal disciplines.

“Spintronics is the discipline dealing with the study and exploitation of the spin of electrons and atom nuclei in matter,” Leburton said. “We study materials and structures that exhibit spin effects for their applications in new device functionality.”

Because Leburton has been active in the WUN -SPIN since its beginning, he was asked to organize the third conference in Illinois.

WUN-SPIN10 will bring together experts in the field of spintronics, an emerging topic in physics and engineering, which has applications in characterization techniques, memory devices and information technology.

 Leburton expects between 60 and 70 people from around the world—England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, China, Japan, Australia, and the United States—to attend the three-day conference.

“This will be presentations of the recent progress in the field, and we’ll discuss perspectives for exploiting spin in new system functionality,” Leburton said. “This will be a very special activity happening here.”

For more information about the conference, visit the conference home page.