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，它为我们目前对半导体材料的理解奠定了基础，并在1947年发明了电子晶体管。这一获得诺贝尔奖的晶体管发现给我们的生活带来了前所未有的影响，现在大多数人每天都在口袋里装着超过10亿个晶体管，它们以智能手机的形式展现出非凡的功能。现代智能手机和电脑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，处理能力会增加一倍。然而，这一进步已经到了尽头——传统的硅基晶体管现在只有100个原子那么长，不能再做得更小了。******此提案是针对开发电子和磁性设备应用的下一个时代材料的研究计划。最近的许多工作都集中在“量子材料”的主题上，这是一个通用术语，指的是表现出独特而有用的特性的材料，这些特性是量子物理学的直接后果，并且在当今电子工业中使用的半导体中找不到。这些特性包括电子相关性、超导性、磁性、金属绝缘体跃迁等等。我的研究小组的专长在于在原子水平上实验探测这些量子材料，以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，以在原子尺度上解开电子和磁性。******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，同时也增强我们对量子材料涌现特性的基本理解。这有可能影响整个社会，就像上面描述的传统晶体管和消费电子产品（如智能手机）一样。因此，这些结果将在一般意义上影响加拿大人，但也有可能诞生一个新的基于氧化物的电子工业，为加拿大的新技术创业公司提供机会（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).**