Jeremy Higgins
Graduate Student, Physical Chemistry
Department of Chemistry
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Biographical Sketch
B.S. University of Pittsburgh, Chemistry, 2005
PhD University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005-Present

Research
My thesis research involves the synthesis, characterization, and physical property measurement of silicon, germanium, and transition metal silicide nanowires and heterostructure nanowires as building blocks for bottom-up nanoelectronic and nanospintronic devices.

The building blocks of modern electronic devices, transistors, have been decreasing in size at steady rate in the past few decades and have already become “nanotechnology” themselves, but it is clear that this transistor size decrease cannot continue indefinitely. Alternative approaches to electronics including the use of the electron’s spin in lieu of or in addition to the electron’s charge need to be developed. Silicon and transition metal silicides, which are already ubiquitous in the electronics industry as channel, interconnect, and gate materials and are CMOS compatible, can be used to study such approaches. Injection, manipulation, and detection of spin in silicon is assisted by the beneficial properties of both silicon and some magnetic transition metal silicide phases, specifically Fe 1-xCo xSi, which allow for polarized currents and long spin lifetimes.

 

Selected Publications and Presentations

1) Higgins, Jeremy M.; Schmitt, Andrew L.; Guzei, Ilia A.; Jin, Song; Higher Manganese Silicide Nanowires of Nowotny Chimney Ladder Phase, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 130 (2008) 16086-16094

2) Schmitt, Andrew L.; Higgins, Jeremy M.; Jin, Song; Chemical Synthesis and Magnetotransport of Magnetic Semiconducting Fe1-xCoxSi Alloy Nanowires, Nano Lett, 2008.