CAREER: Crystal Growth and Scattering Studies of Transition Metal Oxides

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This is a CAREER award to a young faculty member at Stanford University who will setup a research program to grow and study the properties of complex "correlated-electron" transition metal oxides. The project will develop the ability to grow high quality single crystals of transition metal oxides. The crystals will be characterized using X-ray scattering and neutron scattering at two national facilities (Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory and the National Institute of Standards and Technology respectively). The project will increase our understanding of high temperature superconductors, quantum magnetism, and strongly correlated metals, all behaviors exhibited by these materials. These topics are at the forefront of condensed matter physics research.Integrated with this research is an educational plan that will reach out to under-represented groups in the natural sciences, both at the undergraduate and high school level. High school students from a troubled community will be provided the opportunity to perform some exciting summer research. A course in scattering will be developed for students at the upper-undergraduate and first year graduate level.%%%This is a CAREER award to a young faculty member at Stanford University who will set up a research program to study exotic crystals made from planes or chains of transition metals and oxygen. They behave in unique ways that may reveal fundamentally new insights into nature. For example, they can be changed from poor conductors of electricity to good conductors by placing them in a magnetic field or by applying pressure. Planes of copper and oxygen are also critical ingredients in high-temperature superconductors - materials that can carry electricity without resistance when cooled to the temperature of liquid nitrogen. The project involves growing these materials as crystals, and then bombarding them with beams of X-rays and neutrons at several national laboratories. The study of these exotic crystals is at the frontier of condensed matter physics.Integrated with this research is an innovative high school outreach program involving students from East Palo Alto, one of the nation's troubled communities. This program will provide exciting summer research opportunities involving a nearby national laboratory, the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL). In addition, a special effort will be made to involve undergraduate students from groups that are under-represented in the natural sciences in this research project.***