University of Minnesota

Dr. Samarth is Downsbrough Department Head and Professor of Physics at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU). From 1992-1998 he was Assistant Professor of Physics at PSU, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1998 and to Professor in 2001. He performed his post-doctoral research as a Research Associate and Assistant Faculty Fellow at the University of Notre Dame under Professor Jacek Furdyna (1986-1992). He received this Ph.D. in Physics from Purdue University, also under the direction of Professor Jacek Furdyna (1980-1986). He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a recipient of PSU’s Faculty Scholar Medal in the Physical Sciences and received an Outstanding Physics Alumnus Award from Purdue University. Dr. Samarth has pioneered the epitaxial growth and nanopatterning of a variety of spin-based heterostructures based upon both conventional and magnetic semiconductors and ferromagnetic metals, resulting in fundamental advances in semiconductor spintronics [1-6], frustrated magnetic arrays [7,8] and topological insulators [9,10,11]. He has published 225 papers with about 8000 citations and has an h-index of 45.

1.	J. M. Kikkawa, I. P. Smorchkova, N. Samarth, and D. D. Awschalom, “Room-temperature spin memory in two-dimensional electron gases,” Science 277, 1284 (1997).
2.	J. A. Gupta, R. Knobel, N. Samarth, and D. D. Awschalom, “Ultrafast manipulation of electron spin coherence,” Science 292, 2458 (2001).
3.	K. C. Ku et al., “Highly enhanced Curie temperature in low-temperature annealed [Ga,Mn]As epilayers ,” Appl. Phys. Lett. 82, 2302 (2003).
4.	A. H. MacDonald, P. Schiffer and N. Samarth, “Ferromagnetic semiconductors: moving beyond (Ga,Mn)As,” Nature Materials 4, 195 (2005).
5.	K. S. Burch et al., “Impurity band conduction in a high temperature ferromagnetic semiconductor,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, art. no. 087208 (2006).
6.	A. L. Balk et al., "Measurements of Nanoscale Domain Wall Flexing in a Ferromagnetic Thin Film," Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 077205 (2011).
7.	R. F. Wang et al., "Artificial 'spin ice' in a geometrically frustrated lattice of nanoscale ferromagnetic islands," Nature (London) 439, 303 (2006).
8.	S. Zhang et al., "Perpendicular Magnetization and Generic Realization of the Ising Model in Artificial Spin Ice," Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 087201 (2012) .
9.	A. Richardella et al., “Coherent heteroepitaxy of Bi2Se3 on GaAs (111)B,” Appl. Phys. Lett. 97, 262104 (2010).
10	Su-Yang Xu et al., “Hedgehog spin texture and Berry’s phase tuning in a magnetic topological insulator,” Nature Physics 8, 616 (2012).