Shpyrko receives APS organization's Young Investigator Award

The Advanced Photon Source (APS) Users Organization has named Oleg G. Shpyrko as the recipient of the 2008 Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award. The award recognizes an important technical or scientific accomplishment by a young investigator that depended on, or is beneficial to, the APS. Shpyrko received the award during 2008 Users Week at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, where he also presented his work.

Shpyrko has been recognized for reaching a remarkably high level of achievement early in his career. He applied challenging surface and coherent x-ray scattering techniques to understanding the structure and dynamics of liquid metal surfaces and quantum states in condensed matter systems. He is also a dedicated and enthusiastic teacher.

He received his Ph.D. degree from Harvard University in 2004 under the direction of Peter Pershan; he then had postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard and the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Diego Physics Department in 2007.

As a postdoctoral fellow at Argonne, Shpyrko studied domain wall fluctuations in antiferromagnets, technologically important materials used to tailor the properties of magnetic sensors used in hard drive read heads. In antiferromagnets, magnetic properties form distinct regions called domains. Fluctuations in the domain boundaries or walls were expected to cause magnetic noise that could affect the material’s performance, but characteristics of the domains rendered them invisible to conventional techniques.

Shpyrko applied a newly developed technique called x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy to observe fluctuations of these domain walls for the first time. He found that the magnetic noise cannot be eliminated.

The ability to observe domain wall fluctuation is important both for engineering tailored materials and for fundamental studies in condensed matter physics.