Grad Student: Henna Popli Physics graduate student Henna Popli was born in the vibrant city of New Delhi, India. She had an inquisitive mind from an early age, and her family always supported her curiosity. This led to her fascination with science and technology. In high school, she wanted to be an astronaut and idolized Kalpna Chawla, an American astronaut, engineer, and the first woman of Indian origin to go into space, though, unfortunately, her endeavor ended with the accident of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003. Popli’s ambition of becoming an astronaut led her to pursue an undergraduate degree in physics from Khalsa College at the University of Delhi, India. Following graduation, she continued to explore her passion for physics by working on a master’s degree from the School of Physical Science at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. “My exposure to physics research came through interactions with professors, researchers, and scientists, as well as attending lectures, workshops, and summer schools,” she said. While writing her master’s thesis, she was exposed to the field of condensed matter physics and decided to get a Ph.D. She was accepted to the U and was thrilled to join an R1 research university. Popli is a member of the Boehme Group, a research group led by Christoph Boehme, professor of Physics & Astronomy and chair of the department.
Research in spintronics Henna Popli
10
At the U, Popli studies how electron spins move around in condensed matter materials. The research field is called spintronics, short for spin electronics, where the electron spin is used to carry information. Electrons behave as tiny bar magnets as they orbit around the nucleus of an atom. Using quantum mechanics (the science dealing with the behavior of light and matter at scales smaller than atoms) to measure the orientation of the spin, we get two answers—often called spin up or spin down or 1 and 0— and a spintronic device utilizes the intrinsic property of the electrons and its associated magnetic moment. “What this means is that in addition to using the charge properties of particles like electrons, their spin can also be exploited,” said Popli. Traditional electronics make use of the mobility of electrons to process information. Spintronics offers an alternative, relying on the electron’s magnetism, or spin, to encode information. Various external magnetic fields can be applied to control their magnetic states, and Popli studies how this works.
