Professor Li conducts research to unveil structure and property relationships of condensed matter at atomic scale. His current focus is to synthesize homogeneous room temperature diluted magnetic semiconductors (DMS) that may impact the development of next generation electronics - spintronics, which utilizes both the spin and charge degrees of freedom of electron in novel device structures.
His studies address two fundamental questions in condensed matter physics: 1) how are local magnetic moments created in semiconductors, and 2) how do these moments interact with each other to attain long range ferromagnetic ordering. The studies involve material growth using molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), atomic-scale characterization using spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy (SP-STM)and spectroscopy, synchrotron-based x-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD), and first principles calculations. The research is supported by grants from NSF and DOE.
He has published over 70 papers and has given more than 100 invited and contributed presentations. He has received many awards, including the E. W. Müller Outstanding Young Scientist Award of the International Field Emission Society (1996) and the NSF CAREER Award (2001).
Please see www.uwm.edu/~lianli for more details.
