Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) – UMPhy

The “Unite Mixte de Physique CNRS/Thales” (UMPhy), created in 1995, is a joint laboratory between CNRS and the industrial company Thales (previously Thomson-CSF). UMPhy is associated to University Paris-Sud since 2000.

The creation of UMPhy Lab followed a long-standing collaboration between Albert Fert’s team at University Paris-Sud and Alain Friederich’s physics group at Thomson-CSF’s Central Research Lab. This fruitful collaboration, initially centered on magnetic metal multilayers, led first of all to the discovery of the Giant Magnetoresistance effect (GMR) in 1988 whose major importance was recognized by the 2007 Physics Nobel prize. It is also considered as the birth of the field of spintronics with now major applications in everyday’s life.

Since 1995, UMPhy is active in all major topics in the field of spintronics such as spin polarized tunneling, magnetic nanowires, spin injection in a variety of heterostructures based on metals, oxides, semiconductors, and spin transfer effects in nanodevices.

More recently, to cope with the renewal of interest in oxides’ physics, a full research line on Functional Oxides was launched.

Beside the motivation of exploring new fundamental routes, the mission of UMPhy is to propose and demonstrate innovative concepts of devices for medium and long term applications in the frame of signal processing and Beyond CMOS electronics.

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This post was written by Loic socreativ