Novel quantum matter in correlated oxides

电子学开始于金属\lq作为给定的‘。导线由铜制成，触点镀金，电子电流的切换是使用热离子阀门完成的，这些阀门是围绕当时已知的唯一电子物理--真空中管理单一电荷的规则--建造的。以金属为基础的电子技术当时又热又重，而且容易失败，但它改变了世界，给我们带来了电报、电话、无线电、雷达、电视，以及--在它的暮年--第一台电子计算机。当材料科学家将非金属的东西--半导体硅--通过掺杂杂质，以受控的方式将其转变为金属时，这一重大突破到来了。这场悄无声息的革命为我们现在所知的电子技术铺平了道路--酷、轻、非常坚固。但它最初是一门基础科学--探索了解可移动电子在晶体中的行为。事实上，第一个晶体管是由贝尔实验室的科学家制造的，不是作为一种有用的设备，而是作为他们的电子频带理论的概念证明。半导体电子学现在是一项成熟的技术。经过几十年的制造技术改进，在价格和性能上都取得了显著的进步。然而，所有的改进都有其局限性，人们普遍认为，基于半导体的电子产品的最终极限将在未来十年内达到。然后，在没有替代方法的情况下，电子技术将停滞不前。幸运的是，自第一个晶体管问世以来的50年里，材料科学并没有停滞不前，尽管基础研究的重点已经从独立的电子行为转移到电子的合作行为上。这种范式的转变是从金属到氧化物--构成地球大部分地壳的矿物的化学近亲。现在研究的数十万种过渡金属氧化物表现出比元素周期表中为数不多的金属和半导体元素丰富得多的行为范围。通常是磁性的，有时是超导的，它们的材料可以通过调整它们所包含的移动电子的动能和势能的平衡来随意改变。这种灵活性背后的关键原则是强大的电子关联，在这里，就像晶体管诞生时一样，材料科学家、物理学家和技术学家的兴趣是一致的。事实上，如果科学的前沿是由我们没有预料到的事情来定义的，那么强关联系统仍然是人类已知的最广泛和最广泛的前沿之一。这一提议将日本两个最重要的材料集团与来自英国的世界领先的关联电子态专家联合起来，目标是探索电子氧化物材料的基本物理。它建立在东京大学、布里斯托尔大学、京都大学和圣安德鲁斯大学之间极其成功的现有合作基础上。

Electronics started with metals \lq as given'. Wires were made from copper, contacts were plated with gold and the switching of electronic currents was accomplished using thermionic valves, built around the only electronic physics known at the time - the rules governing a single electric charge in a vacuum. Metal-based electronic technology was hot, heavy and prone to failure, but it changed the world, giving us telegraphs, telephones, radio, radar, television and - in its twilight - the very first electronic computers. The great breakthrough came when material scientists took something which was not a metal - the semiconductor silicon - and to turned it into a metal in a controlled way, by doping it impurities.This quiet revolution paved the way for electronic technology as we now know it - cool, light and remarkably robust. But it began as fundamental science - the quest to understand how mobile electrons behave in a crystal. Indeed the very first transistor was built by scientists in Bell Labs, not as a useful device, but as a proof of concept for their theory of the electronic band. Semiconductor electronics is now a mature technology. Decades of refinement of manufacturing technique have brought remarkable gains in price and performance. All refinement has its limits however, and it is widely believed that the final limits of semiconductor based electronics will be reached in the next ten years. Then, in the absence of alternative approaches, electronic technology will stagnate. Fortunately materials science has not stood still in the fifty years since the first transistor, though the focus of fundamental research has shifted from the independent, to the cooperative behaviour of electrons. The paradigm shift is one from metals to their oxides - chemical cousins of the minerals which make up most of the earth's crust.The hundreds of thousands of transition metal oxides now studied exhibit a far richer range of behaviors than the scant tens of metallic and semiconducting elements found in the periodic table. Often magnetic, sometimes superconducting, they have materials which can be altered at will, by tailoring the balance of kinetic and potential energy of the mobile electrons they contain. The key principle underlying this flexibility is that of strong electronic correlation and here, as at the birth of the transistor, the interests of materials scientists, physicists and technologists are aligned. Indeed, if the frontiers of science are defined by the things we weren't expecting to happen, strongly correlated systems remain one of the broadest and wildest frontiers known to Man.This proposal unites two of the most important materials groups in Japan, with world-leading experts on the correlated electron state from the UK, with the goal of exploring the fundamental physics of electronic oxide materials. It builds upon extremely successful existing collaborations between the Universities of Tokyo and Bristol and Kyoto and St Andrews.