Plasmonic interfaces for Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR): The next generation of hard disk drives will use heat to switch smaller magnetic domains (~20 nm) than ever before. Heat is focused onto the magnetic media with a near field transducer (NFT) that propagates light along a nanoscale plasmonic interface. Parasitic dissipation in the NFT itself (rather than in the media) causes heat fluxes at the plasmonic interface that are 100 times as high as at the surface of the sun. In an NSF funded collaboration with Seagate Technology and the Data Storage Systems Center, we are designing adhesion layers and alloys to mitigate temperature excursions due to these heat fluxes.
Nondiffusive thermal transport in Resistive Random Access Memory (RRAM): RRAM offers benefits to nonvolatile memory systems due to scalability, fast switching, and easy fabrication. A low-resistance state is achieved during the set process, when a nanoscale conductive filament (CF), formed by dielectric breakdown in the insulator, bridges the metal contacts. During the reset process, joule heating disrupts the CF and restores the device to a high-resistance state. Through Boltzmann Transport Equation models and thermoreflectance measurements (see image) that uniquely expose phonon properties, we seek to understand how these nondiffusive (i.e. quasi-ballistic) thermal processes impact RRAM. Elements of this project are funding by the NSF and Army Research Office.
