Physical Attraction: The Mysteries of Magnetism

Joachim Stöhr (Professor and Deputy Director, Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory)

This lecture is available for online viewing.

14 December 2004

Most people have intuitive associations with the word “magnetism”  based on everyday life: refrigerator magnets, the compass, north and south poles, or someone’s “magnetic personality”.  Few people, however, realize how complicated the phenomenon really is, how much research still deals with the topic today, and how much it penetrates our modern industrialized world – from electricity, wireless communication at the speed of light to magnetic sensors in cars and data storage in computers. Stöhr's lecture will provide a glimpse at the magic and science behind magnetism: its long history, scientific breakthroughs in its understanding, and its use in our modern society. In the process Stöhr will show how research at SSRL/SLAC is addressing some of the forefront issues in magnetism research and technology today.

About the speaker
Joachim Stöhr was born and grew up in the countryside near Cologne in Germany. After undergraduate work at Bonn University and a Master’s degree on a Fulbright scholarship at Washington State University he received his Ph.D. from the Technical University in Munich in 1974. His research interests have been the development of soft x-ray techniques and their use for materials research since participating in the early synchrotron radiation work at SSRL/SLAC in the mid 1970s. He worked at EXXON and IBM for nearly twenty years before joining the SSRL faculty in 2000. He is also the Deputy Director of SSRL.

His current research interest in magnetism was stimulated while directing magnetism research at the nearby IBM Almaden Research Center, where much of today’s data storage technology was developed. He is presently writing a book on the topic with visiting Professor Hans Christoph Siegmann.