Dr Atsufumi Hirohata has just promoted to a Professor in October 2014 after joining the Department of Electronics in September 2007. He has over 10 years of experience in spintronics, ranging from magnetic-domain imaging to spin-current interference. Before coming to York, he was a researcher at RIKEN, a Japanese governmental research institute, for over two years, where he designed a spin-current interference device, which can be used as a spin operation in a spintronic three-terminal transistor.
He was before working as a postdoctoral researcher at Tohoku University, and successfully fabricated a perfectly ordered epitaxial full-Heusler alloy films, which was the first report to their knowledge and was acknowledged by several awards. He also worked as a postdoctoral associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he demonstrated basic function of a phase-change memory, which has been recently released in a market by Intel. He received his PhD in Physics at the University of Cambridge in 2001 and then served as a research associate at the Cavendish Laboratory in order to complete his study on spin detection of optically pumped spin-polarised electrons in a semiconductor with using a ferromagnetic overlayers, which attracted great interests, resulting a few invited talks and papers. He was originally graduated from Keio University for his BSc and MSc studies in Physics.
His present research interests include fabrication of a spin operator and growth of a half-metalic film.