Resonant x-ray scattering and inverse photoemission in superconductors and oxide electronics

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One of the forefronts of modern materials research is the study of new generations of materials broadly classified as quantum materials. These materials can exhibit strong interactions between electrons, which leads to phenomena that is often both technologically relevant and fundamentally challenging to our understanding of condensed matter physics. A key example of such materials are the cuprate and pnictide high-temperature superconductors. These materials exhibit superconductivity at elevated temperatures, which holds promise for power generation, transportation and storage technologies that can play an important role in our future energy infrastructure. Equally, these materials present a grand challenge to our understanding of materials and the dual goals of understanding the mechanism of high temperature superconductivity and developing a room temperature superconductor for practical applications are two of the greatest outstanding problems in physics. Underlying these problems is a need to understand the roles that strong correlations and charge, spin, orbital and lattice ordering phenomena have in quantum materials. Our proposed research program aims to tackle these grand challenges by pursuing a few key research streams: 1. Investigating stripe order in cuprate superconductors using resonant soft x-ray scattering; 2. Investigating oxide interfaces and multilayers using resonant x-ray reflectivity, and; 3. Investigating electronic structure in quantum materials using inverse photoemission spectroscopy.