CAREER: Study of the Electronic and Spin Degrees of Freedom in Strongly Correlated Electron Materials: A Novel Approach

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The goal of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project, is to acquire fundamental understanding of the electronic properties of novel complex materials, such as high temperature superconductors and colossal magnetoresistance manganites. The goal is to study their elementary excitation to understand how the subtle coupling and the competition between electron, lattice, orbital and spin degrees of freedom, leads to new classes of materials with exotic properties. The approach will: 1) Focus on novel materials, designed and selected so as to enhance one of the relevant variables at a time, thus providing an advantage of understanding step by step the strong interplay between different degrees of freedom in complex materials. 2) Tackle directly the spin degrees of freedom, one of the most important ingredients in determining the ground state properties of correlated materials, through the development of a novel spin-photoemission setup. The educational component of this proposal includes substantial contributions to undergraduate and graduate education and will naturally train future scientists to fully utilize the nation's investment in synchrotron radiation facilities. The above research efforts will also be integrated with the development of a new course and a new series of seminars. The goal the course is to establish a link between academia and industries, to facilitate contacts and joint research programs between the two. The series of seminar aim to outreach for women that purse a scientific career and to create positive role models for women graduate students. Throughout history, the development of new technologies and ultimately industries based on these technologies has been driven by the discovery of new materials. Today, we face a similar opportunity based on the discovery of a new class of materials known as strongly correlated systems. One of the unique aspects of these systems is that one can tune their properties in a fashion completely different than for conventional metal and insulators. For example, it is now possible to make an insulator into a high temperature superconductor simply by adding a very small percentage of charge. With the proper mastery of these materials we can reach a point where these systems can revolutionize industries like energy, transportation, telecom, and more. The goal of this Faculty Early Career Development project is to provide deep insight on the physics and properties of correlated materials. The unique advantage of the proposed approach is to directly probe the dynamics of the electrons and spin, which ultimately provide key insight on the properties of the materials. This will be achieved by combining an experimental technique known as photoemission spectroscopy with the development of a novel tool called spin-photoemission, which will allow one to directly probe the spin. The educational component of this proposal focuses on linking academic efforts with applications in industry. On the academic side, there will be a focus on training future scientists to fully utilize the nation's investment in synchrotron radiation facilities. In addition, there will be a series of seminars designed to encourage women to pursue scientific and engineering careers. An important component of these seminars will be to connect women graduate students with positive role models in both academia and industry.