Emergent Electronic and Magnetic States at Correlated Oxide Interfaces

在过去的世纪里，对新型电子和磁性材料的研究对社会产生了令人难以置信的影响。 可以说，该领域最重要的突破是20世纪20年代至30年代量子力学的发展，它为我们目前对半导体材料的理解以及随后1947年电子晶体管的发明奠定了基础。获得诺贝尔奖的晶体管的发现塑造了我们目前的生活，就像其他人一样，大多数人现在每天都在口袋里携带超过10亿个晶体管，以智能手机的形式展示非凡的功能。当今智能手机和计算机的技术进步令人惊叹：从20世纪60年代到2010年代，大约每两年，基于晶体管的处理器的尺寸就会减半，处理能力就会翻倍。然而，这一进展正在接近尾声--传统的硅基晶体管现在的长度大约为100个原子，而且不能做得更小。** 本提案是一项旨在开发下一代电子和磁性器件应用材料的研究计划。 最近的许多工作都集中在“量子材料”这一主题上，这是一个通用术语，指的是表现出独特和有用特性的材料，这些特性是量子物理学的直接结果，并且在当今电子工业中使用的半导体中没有发现。这些性质包括电子相关性、超导性、磁性、金属-绝缘体转变等。 我的研究小组的专业知识在于在原子水平上对这些量子材料进行实验性探索，以了解它们的独特特性是如何出现的，以及我们如何调整它们以适合设备应用。 我们利用加拿大光源，加拿大首屈一指的研究设施之一，以前所未有的细节研究新的量子材料。我们研究X射线如何被新型量子材料反射，衍射和吸收，以解开原子尺度上的电子和磁性。** 我们研究计划的最终成果将是发现可能适用于下一代电子产品的新量子材料系统，同时也增强了我们对量子材料中涌现特性的基本理解。 这有可能影响整个社会，其方式与上述传统晶体管和消费电子产品（如智能手机）类似。 因此，这些结果将在一般意义上影响加拿大人，但也有可能诞生一个新的基于氧化物的电子行业，为加拿大的新技术初创公司提供机会（在材料合成，设备制造和新功能设备的算法/电路设计领域）。

Research into novel electronic and magnetic materials has had an incredible effect on society over the past century. Arguably the most important breakthroughs in this area were the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s-30s, which laid the groundwork for our current understanding of semiconducting materials, and the subsequent invention of the electronic transistor in 1947. The Nobel-prize winning discovery of the transistor has shaped our current lives like few others, with most people now carrying over 1 billion transistors in their pocket every day in the form of a smartphone exhibiting remarkable capabilities. The technological march toward present day smartphones and computers has been awe-inspiring: roughly every two years from the 1960s to 2010s has seen transistor-based processors halve in size and double in processing capability. However, this progress is reaching its end - conventional silicon-based transistors are now on the order of a hundred atoms in length, and cannot be made much smaller. ******This proposal is for a research program targeted at developing the next era of materials for electronic and magnetic device applications. Much recent work has been focused on the topic of "quantum materials", a general term which refers to materials exhibiting unique and useful properties which are direct consequences of quantum physics and which are not found in the semiconductors used in today's electronic industry. These properties include electronic correlations, superconductivity, magnetism, metal-insulator transitions, and more. The expertise of my research group lies in experimentally probing these quantum materials at the atomic level, to understand how their unique properties emerge, and how we can tune them to be suitable for device applications. We utilize the Canadian Light Source, one of Canada's premier research facilities, to study new quantum materials in unprecedented detail. We study how x-rays are reflected, diffracted, and absorbed by new types of quantum materials, to disentangle the electronic and magnetic properties at the atomic scale. ******The ultimate outcomes of our research program will be to discover new quantum material systems which may be suitable for next generation electronics, while also enhancing our fundamental understanding of emergent properties in quantum materials. This has the potential to impact society as a whole, in a similar manner as conventional transistors and consumer electronics such as smartphones as described above. These outcomes would thus affect Canadians in a general sense, but also have the possibility to birth a new oxide-based electronics industry, with opportunities for new technology-based start-up companies in Canada (in the areas of materials synthesis, device fabrication, and algorithm/circuit design for new functional devices).**