Jagadeesh Moodera

Who is Jagadeesh Moodera?

Jagadeesh Subbaiah Moodera is an American physicist of Indian origin and is senior research scientist at MIT's Francis Bitter Magnet Laboratory. In 1994 he led an MIT research team in the discovery of a practical way to implement room temperature magnetic tunnel junction using a magnetic stack based on CoFe–Al2O3–Co, demonstrating a tunnel magnetoresistance ratio of 11.8%.

Low temperature magnetoresistive tunneling had been discovered by Michel Julliere in 1975 but it would be more than a decade before a room temp system was found. In 1991, Terunobu Miyazaki and others at Tohoku University had demonstrated a MTJ with room temp TMR of 2.7% but this effect was too small to be of use in practical devices. In 1994, Miyazaki's team, working independently of Moodera's, also developed a room temperature MTJ with high TMR based on an Fe–Al2O3–Fe stack, thus garnering recognition as co-developer of room temp magnetoresistive tunnelling along with Moodera.

Besides its great fundamental interest, room temperature magnetoresistive tunnelling is the basis for practical devices including MRAM and read heads used in hard disks.