Emergent Electronic and Magnetic States at Correlated Oxide Interfaces

在过去的一个世纪里，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，这一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，为我们目前对半导体材料的理解奠定了基础，以及随后在1947年发明的电子晶体管。诺贝尔奖获得者晶体管的发现改变了我们现在的生活，几乎没有人能与之相提并论，现在大多数人每天都会把超过10亿个晶体管放在口袋里，以智能手机的形式展示出非凡的功能。迈向当今智能手机和计算机的技术进步令人敬畏：从20世纪60年代到2010年代，大约每两年就有一次基于晶体管的处理器体积减半，处理能力翻一番。然而，这一进步正在走向尽头--传统的硅基晶体管现在的长度约为100个原子，不能再小得多。*这项提案是针对一项旨在开发下一代电子和磁性设备应用材料的研究计划。最近的工作主要集中在“量子材料”这一主题上，这是一个通用的术语，指的是具有独特和有用的性质的材料，这些性质是量子物理的直接结果，在当今电子工业使用的半导体中找不到。这些性质包括电子关联、超导、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实验探索这些量子材料，了解它们的独特性质是如何出现的，以及我们如何调整它们以适合设备应用。我们利用加拿大主要研究设施之一的加拿大光源，以前所未有的详细程度研究新的量子材料。我们研究X射线是如何被新型量子材料反射、衍射和吸收的，以在原子尺度上解开电子和磁性的纠缠。*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学的新的量子材料系统，同时也增强我们对量子材料的涌现性质的基本理解。这有可能对整个社会产生影响，就像上述传统晶体管和智能手机等消费电子产品一样。因此，这些结果将在一般意义上影响加拿大人，但也有可能催生一个新的以氧化物为基础的电子工业，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).**