The Roadmap of Oxide Electronics

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After several years of effort, the Roadmap of Oxide Electronics is now on line. This document was put together within the COST TO-BE project coordinated by Fabio Miletto Granozio from CNR-SPIN in Naples, and supervised by Mariona Coll and Josep Fontcuberta from ICMAB in Barcelona and Nini Pryds from Denmark Technical University. It covers virtually all areas of oxide research, from nanoelectronics, power electronics, spintronics to photonics, and gives a critical view on the future development of the field. We are glad to be a part of it !

Towards Oxide Electronics: a Roadmap
M. Coll et al, Appl. Surf. Sci. 482, 1 (2019)

Lorenzo Vistoli receives Invention award

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Our PhD student Lorenzo Vistoli (second from the left) won the “Invention/innovation award” at the Italian embassy during the “Journée de la recherche italienne” organized by the RéCIF (Réseau des Chercheurs Italiens en France), in honor of the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s birth. He won the first place in a competition for young Italian researchers, based on scientific merit and a poster presentation on potential innovative applications of their research.

Congratulations Lorenzo !

Origin of band gaps in 3d perovskite oxides

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Transition metal perovskite oxides ABO3 have a very rich array of properties, and many compounds show an insulating behavior, despite the presence of a finite number of d electrons. This insulating character is often ascribed to dynamical electron correlations, but perovskites also possess structural distorsions that break symmetries, lift electronic degeneracies, and may thus also open band gaps. In a paper just published in Nature Communications, we show that if one allows symmetry-breaking energy-lowering crystal symmetry reductions and electronic instabilities within Density Functional Theory (DFT), one successfully and systematically recovers the trends in the observed band gaps, magnetic moments, type of magnetic and crystallographic ground state, bond disproportionation and ligand hole effects, Mott vs. charge transfer insulator behaviors, and the amplitude of structural deformation modes including Jahn-Teller in low temperature spin-ordered and high temperature disordered paramagnetic phases. Since DFT does not include dynamic correlations, our work suggests that they do not play a major role in determining the metallic or insulating nature of these oxides. In other words, ABO3 may be complicated, but they are not necessarily strongly correlated.

This work was performed in collaboration with the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Origin of band gaps in 3d perovskite oxides
Julien Varignon, Manuel Bibes & Alex Zunger, Nature Commun. 10, 1658 (2019)

New group member

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Since April 1st, we have a new group member, Srijani Mallik. Srijani is from Kolkota, India and in our group she is a postdoctoral researcher  within a FEINMAN project sponsored by Intel Corporation. The project will focus on the study of oxide interfaces as efficient spin-charge converters for new non-volatile spin-based logic.

Welcome Srijani !