Randall H. Victora
Professor
Department Head

  

Area of expertise: Magnetism and magnetics

Education
Ph.D., Physics, 1985, University of California, Berkeley, CA, United States
B.S., Math, 1980, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States
B.S., Physics, 1980, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States

Contact Information
Office: 6-157 Keller Hall
Telephone: (612) 625-1825
E-mail: victora (at) umn.edu
Personal Web Site: http://www.ece.umn.edu/~MINT/members/victora.html

Honors/Awards
Technical Achievement Award of Information Storage Industry Consortium (2001, 2006)
General Chairman, 50th Conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (2005)
President, IEEE Magnetics Society (2009, 2010)
Fellow, American Physical Society
Fellow, IEEE

Synopsis
My research involves the theory and modeling of magnetic materials for information storage, spintronics, and biomedical applications. I try to predict macroscopic properties, such as hysteresis loops, ferromagnetic relaxation, magnetoresistance, and magnetic recording noise, from atomic and microscopic information. My two primary tools are micromagnetic simulation and electronic structure theory based on the local density approximation. My choice of research problem is strongly motivated by my industrial experience in the areas of magnetic and optical recording. Typically, my projects involve extensive collaboration with experimentalists.

Selected publications
"Intrinsic non-linear ferromagnetic relaxation in thin metallic films", A. Yu. Dobin and R.H. Victora, Physical Review Letters 90, 167203 (2003).

"Composite Media for Perpendicular Magnetic Recording", R.H. Victora and X. Shen, IEEE Trans. Magn. 41, 537 (2005)

"Surface Scattering in Metallic Nanowires", X. Chen and R.H. Victora, Appl. Phys. Lett. 93, 162105 (2008).