Emergent Electronic and Magnetic States at Correlated Oxide Interfaces

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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).