A Distinguished Professor of Physics at The Graduate Center and Lehman College, Eugene Chudnovsky is investigating properties of very small magnets. His research, which has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy, U. S. Department of Defense, and by private industry totals over $150,000 annually. Recent progress in measuring techniques has enabled scientists to manufacture and study magnets consisting of only a few atoms. This branch of physics has been named nanomagnetism, reflecting the nanometer size of the magnet. Relatively large magnets, as, for example, an arrow of a compass, have permanent locations of their north and south magnetic poles. In nanomagnets, the locations of the magnetic poles change in time at a rate that depends on the material and the size of the magnet. This effect, predicted theoretically by Dr. Chudnovsky, has been called magnetic quantum tunneling. It has significant technological implications. First, it determines the minimal size of the magnetic memory unit and, thus, the ultimate density of the data storage in magnetic recording. Second, it opens the possibility of building a magnetic "qubit," an element of a quantum computer. Such a computer, which will be a thousand times faster than most powerful modern computers, does not exist yet, but a large number of research laboratories are competing to build it. Professor Chudnovsky collaborates with experimentalists at City College, led by Distinguished Professor Myriam Sarachik, and with experimentalists at the University of Barcelona, led by Professor Javier Tejada.
In 2002-2003 Prof. Chudnovsky published 8 research articles and gave 7 invited talks at international meetings. He and his co-authors suggested two novel effects. The first is generic decoherence due to conservation laws that rules the operation of magnetic and superconducting qubits. The second is superradiance from crystals of molecular nanomagnets, which can provide new sources of coherent microwave radiation.