Novel quantum matter in correlated oxides

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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.