Designer Oxides: Reactive-Oxide Molecular Beam Epitaxy System

先进材料是一项关键的使能技术，是每一个新的或改进的设备或技术应用的核心。氧化物基材料具有巨大的潜力，可以在众多技术领域实现跨步变革，其丰富的物理特性使其成为从多相催化到新型量子电子学等领域实现变革进步的理想候选者。然而，为了充分发挥其潜力，有必要开发调整其物理特性的方法，以便为给定应用“按需”建立所需的材料特性组合。我们建议创建一个世界范围内独一无二的设施，用于这种设计氧化物材料的引导合成，为下一代氧化物基技术铺平道路。这个新设施的核心将是一个最先进的反应性氧化物分子束外延系统，使原子级结构过渡金属氧化物异质结构和亚稳薄膜的生长成为可能。它将与现有的最先进的光谱探针相结合，包括低温扫描隧道显微镜、光谱学和角度分辨光发射。这将为原子和电子结构以及许多氧化物奇异特性核心的量子多体相互作用提供前所未有的反馈，揭示如何通过定制材料生长来调整这些结构，以创造新的先进材料。这将为相关电子系统、能量储存和收集材料、催化、传感、量子技术和纳米科学的研究开辟新的途径，所有这些都将利用人造氧化物的定制状态。它将作为一个共享设施运营，我们的目标是在英国建立一个领先的定制氧化物薄膜供应中心。

Advanced materials are a key enabling technology, lying at the heart of every new or improved device or technology application. Oxide-based materials hold enormous promise to deliver a step change across a multitude of technology sectors, with their rich physical properties making them ideal candidates to deliver transformative advances in areas spanning from heterogeneous catalysis to novel quantum electronics. To realise their full potential, however, it is necessary to develop ways to tune their physical properties in order to stablise a desired combination of materials characteristics "on demand" for a given application. We propose the creation of a world-wide unique facility for such a guided synthesis of designer oxide materials, paving the way to next generation oxide-based technologies.The core of this new facility will be a state-of-the art reactive-oxide molecular-beam epitaxy system, enabling the growth of atomic-scale structured transition-metal oxide heterostructures and metastable thin films. It will be coupled to existing state-of-the-art spectroscopic probes including low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy and angle-resolved photoemission. This will provide unprecedented feedback on the atomic and electronic structure and the quantum many-body interactions at the heart of the exotic properties of many oxides, revealing how these can be tuned through custom materials growth to create new advanced materials. This will open new avenues for research in correlated electron systems, materials for energy storage and harvesting, catalysis, sensing, quantum technologies and nanoscience, all exploiting tailored states in artificial oxides. It will operate as a shared facility, which we aim to establish as a leading centre for the supply of custom oxide thin films within the UK.