Geoffrey Stephen Beach

Background and Experience

Professor Geoffrey Beach’s research focuses on spin dynamics and “spin-electronics”—the study of new materials whose magnetic properties could be changed electrically—in nanoscale magnetic materials and devices. Developing ways to store information more densely and access it more quickly requires understanding the magnetization configurations in nanoscale structures and how they evolve. A major thrust of Professor Beach’s research aims to harness the spin of the electron in magnetic materials to realize new approaches to spin-based storage and computation. Studying these processes requires the development of advanced instrumentation capable of probing magnetization dynamics at the shortest timescales and the smallest length scales. His research group develops new optical and electrical approaches to push detection limits, enabling development of new materials and structures to meet the information storage and processing demands of the future.

Professor Beach earned a BS in physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1997 and a PhD in physics at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in 2003. He worked in the Center for Magnetic Recording Research at UCSD to develop novel magnetic thin-film nanocomposites for ultrafast data storage applications. He later went on to the University of Texas at Austin as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Physics and the Texas Materials Institute, where he made discoveries in magnetization dynamics and spin-transfer torque in nanoscale magnetic structures.