MAGNETISM ELECTRON TRANSPORT MAGNETORESISTIVE LANTHANUM CALCIUM MANGANITE

Preface
Looking back at the many years at Stanford, there are many people I would
like to thank for helping me along the long, windy path to a Ph.D. thesis. My
dad, papa Schneider, Dr. Demin, and Frank DiSalvo deserve the credit for
getting me interested in science: chemistry, engineering, materials science and
physics.
The graduate first year classes at Stanford would have been far too
unbearable without the support of my first year commiserators Weber, Jim
and Shelly. My time at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, Germany could
not have been more productive or pleasant thanks to Prof. Dr. Arndt Simon,
the whole Abteilung Simon and foreign student ghetto especially Paul Rauch,
Thomas Braun and Chris Ewels.
Having nothing to do with superconductivity, much of my work at
Stanford was outside the KGB headquarters in Ginzton Lab. The materials
synthesis for this project was done at the Center for Materials Research in the
McCullough building. Bob Feigelson and his group deserve a special thanks
for advice and use of equipment, such as the laser heated crystal growth
apparatus. Some of the crystal samples used in this thesis were grown by
Vlad Beffa, a Stanford undergraduate working as a CMR summer student. I
would also like to thank the CMR support staff: Tracy Tingle with the SEM
microprobe, Glen and Waldo for keeping up the x-ray facility, Ann Marshall
for TEM studies, and Thomas Carlson and Mark Gibson for knowing how to
get everything done in McCullough. I would especially like to thank Bob
White, Shan Wang and their students for teaching me about magnetic and
magnetoresistive materials in their group meetings.
Thanks also to the KGB group, especially Ted and Mac for helping me get
started. K. A. Moler performed most of the experiment and much of the
analysis of the heat capacity experiment in Appendix B. Lior Klein was the
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