Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Kenneth H. Keller Hall
Rm 6-157
200 Union Street Se
Minneapolis, MN 55455
Affiliations
ECE Department Head
Center for Micromagnetics and Information Technology
Graduate faculty – Physics
Education
Ph.D., Physics, 1985, University of California, Berkeley, CA
B.S., Math, 1980, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
B.S., Physics, 1980, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
Biography
Dr. Victora is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Victora earned B.S. degrees in Physics and Math from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1980. After receiving his Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 1985, he held research positions at Kodak Research Laboratories until joining academia in 1998. He has several technical contributions used widely within commercial hard disk drives, including Exchange Coupled Composite Media that enabled a large increase in areal density. Other contributions include a widely used scaling law that relates magnetic switching fields to measurement times and calculations for magnetic anisotropy. Much of his theoretical work on magnetic damping in thin films has been prominently published. In recent years, a major focus has been the design of very low energy memory based on spin-transfer torque or spin-orbit torque. He is one of only two researchers to have twice received the Technical Achievement Award of the Information Storage Industry Consortium (INSIC). He received the 2014 Achievement Award of the IEEE Magnetics Society. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and the American Physical Society. Professor Victora is also a member of the physics graduate faculty, and, since 2015, serves as Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Research Interests
My research involves the theory and modeling of magnetic materials for information storage, spintronics, and microwave applications. I try to predict macroscopic properties, such as hysteresis loops, ferromagnetic relaxation, magnetoresistance, and magnetic noise, from atomic and microscopic information. My two primary tools are micromagnetic simulation and electronic structure theory.
My choice of research problem is strongly motivated by my industrial experience in the areas of memory and storage. Typically, my projects involve extensive collaboration with experimentalists.
https://experts.umn.edu/en/persons/randall-h-victora
Currently Teaching Courses
EE 5653 - Physical Principles of Magnetic Materials
Honors and Awards
IEEE Magnetics Society Achievement Award (2014)
Distinguished University Teaching Professor (2016)
Technical Achievement Award of Information Storage Industry Consortium (2001, 2006)
General Chairman, 50th Conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (2005)
President, IEEE Magnetics Society (2009, 2010)
Fellow, American Physical Society
Fellow, IEEE
Selected Publications
“Enhancement of Giant Magnetoresistance and Oscillation by Wave-vector Filtering in Fe/Ag/Fe/InAs/Ag”, Z. Wang and R.H. Victora, Phys. Rev. B 94, 245415 (2016)
“Dual Referenced Composite Free Layer Design for Improved Switching Efficiency of Spin-Transfer Torque Random Access Memory”, R. Bell, J. Hu, and R. H. Victora, IEEE Electron Device Letters 37, 1108 (2016)
“Composite Media for High Density Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording”, Z. Liu, Y. Jiao, and R.H. Victora, Appl. Phys. Lett. 108, 232402 (2016)
“Predicted time dependence of the switching field for magnetic materials”, R.H. Victora, Phys. Rev. Lett. 63, 457 (1989)
“Localization noise in deep subwavelength plasmonic devices”, A. Ghoreyshi and R. H. Victora, Phys. Rev. B 97, 205430 (2018)
“Effect of Substitutional Defects on Kambersky Damping in L10 Magnetic Materials”, T. Qu and R.H. Victora, Appl. Phys. Lett. 106, 072404 (2015)
“Novel System Design for Readback at 10 Terabits per Square Inch User Areal Density”, Y. Wang, M.F. Erden, and R.H. Victora, IEEE Magnetics Letters 3, 4500304 (2012)
“Materials for Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording”, M.T. Kief and R.H. Victora, MRS Bulletin 43, 87-92 (2018)
“Composite Media for Perpendicular Magnetic Recording”, R.H. Victora and X. Shen, IEEE Trans. Magn. 41, 537 (2005)
“Intrinsic non-linear ferromagnetic relaxation in thin metallic films”, A. Yu. Dobin and R.H. Victora, Physical Review Letters 90, 167203 (2003)
