Novel poly(arylene ether ketone) polymers with fluorophenyl pendants and phenoxide-terminated wholly sulfonated poly(arylene ether sulfone) oligomers are prepared via Ni(0)-catalyzed and nucleophilic polymerization, respectively, and subsequently used as starting materials to obtain graft-crosslinked membranes as polymer electrolyte membranes. The phenoxide-terminated sulfonated moieties are introduced as hydrophilic parts as well as crosslinking units. The chemical structure and morphology of the obtained membranes are confirmed by (1) H NMR and tapping-mode AFM. The properties required for fuel cell applications, including water uptake and dimensional change, as well as proton conductivity, are investigated. AFM results show a clear nanoscale phase-separation microstructure of the obtained membranes. The membranes show good dimensional stability and reasonably high proton conductivities under 30-90% relative humidity. The anisotropic proton conductivity ratios (σ(formula see text) ) of the membranes in water are in the range 0.65-0.92, and increase with an increase in hydrophilic block length. The results indicate that the graft-crosslinked membranes are promising candidates for applications as polymer electrolyte membranes.

Epitaxial L1 0 MnAl films demonstrated two different kinds of magneto-transport behaviors as a function of temperature. The magneto-resistance ratio (MR) was negative and exhibited evident enhancement in the resistivity at coercive fields above ~175 K. The MR enhancement was attributed to the increase of the magnetic domain walls based on the quantitative correlation between the domain density and the resistivity. Below 175 K, the MR was positive and showed a quadratic dependence on the external magnetic field, which implied that the MR was dominated by Lorentz effects below 175 K.

DC current induced magnetization reversal and magnetization oscillation was observed in 500 nm large size Co 90 Fe 10 /Cu/Ni 80 Fe 20 pillars. A perpendicular external field enhanced the coercive field separation between the reference layer (Co 90 Fe 10 ) and free layer (Ni 80 Fe 20 ) in the pseudo spin valve, allowing a large window of external magnetic field for exploring the free-layer reversal. The magnetization precession was manifested in terms of the multiple peaks on the differential resistance curves. Depending on the bias current and applied field, the regions of magnetic switching and magnetization precession on a dynamical stability diagram has been discussed in details. Micromagnetic simulations are shown to be in good agreement with experimental results and provide insight for synchronization of inhomogenieties in large sized device. The ability to manipulate spin-dynamics on large size devices could prove useful for increasing the output power of the spin-transfer nano-oscillators (STNOs).Spin-polarized currents can be harnessed to manipulate magnetization and excite oscillation via the spin transfer torque (STT) effect, and are utilized in the application of MRAM [1,2] and spin-transfer nano-oscillators (STNOs) [3,4] . STNOs have the advantages that their frequencies are highly tunable by current and magnetic field over a range from 2 a few GHz to 40 GHz. [3,5] Furthermore, the nanometer sized devices are among the smallest microwave oscillators yet developed [6] and their compatibility with standard silicon processing opens the possibility for on-chip applications. [7,8] However, the bottlenecks for the widespread application of STNOs lies in the enhancement of the output power above the current limit of ~ 0.5µW. [9] It has been suggested that two nano-contact STNOs in close proximity could mutually phase-lock and increase the output power; however phase-locking of more than two STNOs remains technologically challenge. [10][11][12][13][14] Instead of putting an array of STNOs nano-magnets together, we propose to make use of larger sized magnets in the hope that synchronization of multiple domains could lead to higher output power, and firstly we demonstrated that spin-transfer torque can be used to efficiently induce magnetization switching and oscillation in 500 nm large size devices. For large size device, our simulation results have shown that the non-uniform oscillations tend to synchronize with each other and generate coherent oscillation. In addition, large sized nano-magnets can be fabricated more cost-effectively through photolithography rather than using electron beam lithography. 3The magnetic multilayer was synthesized by sputtering in a Biased Target Ion Beam Deposition system (BTIBD). The deposition details can be found elsewhere. [15] The complete structure of the multilayer is SiO 2 (substrate)/20nm Ru/2.2nm Co 90 Fe 10 (reference layer)/5nm Cu/6.5nm Ni 80 Fe 20 (free layer)/5nm Ru/Ti 5nm/Au 25nm. A magnetoresistance (MR) of ~1.2% was measured in the pseudo spin-valve continuous f...

The correlation between the magnetic properties and the interelement separation in patterned arrays of ultrathin single crystal Fe films of 12 monolayers (ML) grown on GaAs(100) has been studied. The critical condition to form single domain remanent states in the square elements was found to be 10 μm in size and 20 μm for the interelement separation. The coercivity was also found to increase with the increasing interelement separation in the patterned arrays. These results are attributed to the competition between the large in-plane uniaxial anisotropy, the demagnetizing field, and interelement dipole coupling as determined semiqualitatively by the ferromagnetic resonance measurements.