HOUSTON - Whether you're a soldier navigating a minefield or a doctor examining a tumor, how well you know the territory can make all the difference in the outcome.

That's why military and medical personnel increasingly rely on magnetic field sensors to help map their respective terrains - and why the

Stanko Brankovic, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering with the Cullen College of Engineering at UH, and co-principle investigator Paul Ruchhoeft, also a UH assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, will use the grant to create a new type of magnetic field sensor that, if successful, will be hundreds - perhaps thousands - of times more sensitive than anything currently available.
On the military front, hundreds of thousands or more of these sensors could be the key components in a low-cost system that maps minefields quickly and accurately. In the medical arena, the sensors could be applied to magnetic resonance imaging, yielding highly detailed images of, for example, a tumor or an injured knee.

The funding for the project, "Single Ferromagnetic Nanocontact-Based Devices as Magnetic Field Sensors," will be delivered in two stages. The first stage, valued at $100,000 for one year, requires a proof of concept, in which Brankovic and Ruchhoeft must construct a working sensor. To do this, they will utilize new ideas in the nanoengineering of novel materials and the development of nanofabrication processes for devices smaller than 10 nanometers.

Should they succeed, the DOD will consider awarding them an extra $1.5 million to complete an entire system that incorporates multiple sensors, data-transmission equipment, and equipment and software that translate data into an easily understandable format.

The team's sensors will be based upon the phenomenon known as "ballistic magnetoresistance," which is the effect of a magnetic field on the ability of eU.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has awarded a University of Houston researcher and his team a grant worth up to $1.6 million to build the most powerfulectrons to flow between magnetic electrodes through a nanocontact - a tiny wire measuring billionths of a meter that forms naturally between magnetic electrodes.

If the two electrodes' magnetic orientations (the direction in which a material's magnetism pushes or pulls) are different, some of the electrons flowing between them will be repelled by the spot in the nanocontact where the two different magnetizations meet, Brankovic said.

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