Professor KIM Kee Hoon

Professor KIM Kee Hoon (Department of Physics and Astronomy) has developed a magnet which can change poles without the help of a magnetic field. Magnetic materials, which are a key component in hard disks, record information usually by changing poles using magnetic fields. This caused many problems such as heat loss from electric currents to create a magnetic field and big size to creat the current loop. Professor Kim replaced the iron in the well-known hexaferrite material (common magnet attached in a fridge at home) with aluminum, thus creating magnetoeletric hexaferrite, and succeeded in changing magnetic poles using only electric voltage. “By changing poles with voltage and not electric currents, we can create ultra-low power consuming magnetic devices,” said Professor Kim.

• This development was published in the June 24 online edition of Nature Communications.
• Professor KIM Kee Hoon's lab: http://censcmr.snu.ac.kr/
• SNU Department of Physics and Astronomy (Physics Major): http://phya.snu.ac.kr

Summary by LEE Hee Un, SNU English Editor, gurume0221@snu.ac.kr