Prof. Tai Kong Receives NSF CAREER Award
The Department of Physics is pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Tai Kong has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award. The NSF CAREER Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. NSF will support Prof. Kong $726,413 over the next five years for his research entitled "Design and synthesis of functional van der Waals magnet".
About the Research
Magnetism is a fascinating property in materials. In addition to commonly seen usage as a permanent magnet that appears in motors and generators etc., magnetism is also a key player in many electronic devices and emergent physical phenomena such as superconductivity. Magnetism can mainly be carried by the spin and orbital motion of electrons. Due to interactions between electrons, randomly oriented magnetic moments can arrange themselves in a periodic fashion below certain temperature, which is called a long-range ordering. Our daily used magnets, for example, possess such long-range ordering where all magnetic moments are aligned parallelly.
Recent research suggests that such long-range magnetic ordering can be sustained in low dimensions. This property offers a unique avenue for manipulating magnetism at nanoscale. However, the development of low-dimensional magnetism faces significant constraints due to a limited understanding of magnetic properties and a lack of available layered magnetic materials. The goals of this CAREER project are to advance the understanding of low dimensional magnetic ordering through systematic thermodynamic characterization, and to synthesize new magnetic van der Waals (vdW) materials that will play a major role in future electronics.
Experimental efforts from Kong’s lab will focus on systematically characterizing the magnetic exchange interaction and magnetic anisotropy of bulk vdW magnets through low-temperature magnetization and heat capacity measurements. These experimental results are crucial for a quantitative understanding of the key factors that influence the magnetic properties of layered magnets in both bulk form and at the two-dimensional limit. Kong’s lab also aims to design and synthesize new functional vdW magnets that exhibit a controlled magnetic behavior and high magnetic ordering temperature by integrating chemistry and physics guiding principles. Various underdeveloped areas will be investigated, including rare earth magnetism and materials crystallizing in perovskite-type structures.
More details can be found for NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program and this award.
About Tai Kong
Dr. Kong joined the University of Arizona in August 2019 as an Assistant Professor of physics. Prior to joining our department, he obtained his Ph.D. from Iowa State University in 2016 and then worked as a postdoc researcher at Princeton University from 2016-2019. His research focuses on the design, synthesis, and characterization materials with novel magnetic and electronic properties, for the purpose of bettering our understanding and control of emergent electronic behavior in quantum materials. More details can be found on his group website.