The U.S. Department of Energy’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DOE EPSCOR) awarded $2.5 million to a team including Xia Hong, Peter Dowben, Evgeny Tsymbal, Xiaoshan Xu, and Zuocheng Zhang with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Department of Physics and Astronomy. These scientists have been working together on Nebraska’s Emergent Quantum Materials and Technologies (EQUATE) project, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF).
The new, two-year project, Emergent Interface Phenomena Enabled by Ferroelectric Oxide Thin Films and Membranes, also includes South Dakota School of Mines and Technology faculty Tula R. Paudel, Department of Physics, and Alexey Lipatov, Department of Chemistry, Biology, and Health Sciences.
Hong, the project’s principal investigator (PI), said the goal of the new collaboration is to “design, realize, and control a range of emergent interface phenomena in ferroelectric oxide thin films, membranes, and heterostructures.” She said the work will focus on ferroelectric perovskite oxides: materials with built-in polarization fields controlled at the nanoscale level with abilities to change quantum properties--which will be interfaced with strongly-correlated oxides and two-dimensional materials. Manipulating polarization fields in these ferroelectric materials could reshape the functionalities of interfacial materials in ways not seen before.
The related structures, pairings and layering could reveal new quantum behaviors to researchers: to transform electronics and also yield breakthroughs in energy use and quantum computing.
