CONTACT
Director
Prof. Harald Brune
Secretary
Mme. F. Choulat
Mme. C. Roulin
LNS/IPN/SB
EPFL
Station 3
CH-1015 Lausanne
Switzerland
Tel: +41 21 693 33 20
Tel: +41 21 693 03 02
Fax: +41 21 693 36 03
How to find us
Mission
Professor Harald Brune's research program focuses on the exploration of the novel physical
and chemical properties arising when metals shrink to the nanoscale. Starting from a detailed
understanding of epitaxial growth, derived from variable temperature scanning tunneling microscopy
(STM) experiments compared with theoretical modeling, we use self-assembly to grow metallic
nanostructures with the desired morphology, size, and spacing at single crystal surfaces. These
samples are then investigated either by spatially integrating measurements, revealing the
properties of the ensemble of nanostructures, or by addressing some of the properties of interest
directly at the atomic scale by means of STM. We intend to identify the individual contributions
of each of the differently coordinated constituent atoms with the ultimate goal to engineer
nanostructures with desired properties, such as magnetic anisotropy energy and moment,
spin-polarization at the Fermi level, chemical reactivity and selectivity.
Examples
One of our objectives is to address scaling issues of magnetic information storage relevant for computer hard disks and magnetic random access memories (MRAMs). For instance, we explore the ultimate density limit of non-interacting ferromagnetic monodomain particles which remain blocked at room temperature. We also investigate reading and writing of such structures with spin-polarized currents. We assemble metallic clusters inspired in their composition by cofactors of biological enzymes with the goal to run catalytic reactions in the way the enzymes do. Another branch of our research uses atomic force microscopy to address nanotribology and mechanical properties of nanometer scale objects at surfaces. For more details see the research projects.