Objective
It is well known that close packed clean metals, despite of being highly symmetric, exhibit a rich variety of clean surface terminations. Chiral metallic crystalline surfaces have been used for chiral recognition and separation of enantiomer molecules. Traditionally, studies on chiral surfaces have been motivated by chemistry and biochemistry applications, while other intrinsic properties of these substrates have been unnoticed. On this basis, the present proposal aims to understand and exploit elastic and magnetic phenomena in these substrates using Density Functional Theory calculations. We wish to investigate the implications of chirality and reduced symmetry on the surface stress and the magnetic anisotropy, which are physical properties strongly influenced by the surface symmetry and geometry. Potential applications can be foreseen in sensors and data storage devices. More interestingly, chiral non-collinear spin structures can be predicted on these surfaces, which would play a crucial role in the development of spintronic devices.
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Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2007-2-1-IEF
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)Coordinator
CB2 1TN Cambridge
United Kingdom