Lab-Funded Professor "Spins" Prestigious Turnbull Award Published Oct. 14, 2010 By Maria Callier Office of Scientific Research ARLINGTON, Virginia -- Dr. David Awschalom, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, earned the 2010 Materials Research Society's David Turnbull Award--one of its three highest honors conferred--for research funded in large measure by Air Force Research Laboratory. Slated for presentation during the society's fall meeting (Boston, Massachusetts), the award recognizes Dr. Awschalom's achievements and leadership in establishing the field of semiconductor spintronics, including his fundamental discoveries of spin transport and coherence in the solid state, development of new experimental techniques and materials engineering for spin-based quantum information science, and communications excellence through lecturing and writing. Professor Awschalom's fundamental research in two areas--the coherent manipulation of spins in semiconductors and the manipulation and control of nanometer-scale magnetism for multifunctional information processing--is of particular interest to the Air Force, given the respective potential of each to improve future AF systems via quantum information processing. Further highlighting the importance of this research are Prof Awschalom's lab-sponsored investigations towards manipulating and controlling electronic spin states in diamond films, a capability paving the way to room-temperature-based quantum computing and, consequently, initiating a new generation of information science that will ultimately dwarf today's state-of-the-art computing technologies.