The new science of oxide interfaces

• Professor Mark Blamire, University of Cambridge, UK

Mark Blamire took over the leadership the Device Materials Group in the Department of Materials Science in 2004; this works across a broad spectrum of novel functional materials and in this field is one of the foremost groups in the world. The group now consists of around forty full-time workers and contains four academic staff, two Advanced Fellows and a Technical Officer.

His research is unusually broad and interdisciplinary, encompassing metals, oxides and nitrides; superconductors, ferromagnets and ferroelectrics, and device nanofabrication. However, Mark has core activity on the study of novel materials within devices, on the interactions of these materials at interfaces, and on the effect of microstructural defects on their functional properties, which gives strength and coherency to the programme as a whole. 

• Professor Dave Blank, University of Twente, The Netherlands

Dave H.A. Blank was born in 1953 in Amsterdam. After his masters in Applied Physics, he received in 1991 his PhD in Physics from the University of Twente, Netherlands for his dissertation on High-Tc thin films prepared by laser ablation: an experimental study.  Since October 2002 he is full professor in Inorganic Materials Science at the same university. From January 1, 2007 he is the Scientific Director of MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Twente. In 2002 he was awarded with the VICI laureate of the Dutch Science Foundation for his work on artificial materials for nanoscale devices. In 2009 he became chairman of the steering committee FES 2009 initiative High Tech Systems and Materials. From November 2010 on he is chairman of the executive Board of this FES programme, called NanoNextNl. In February 2011 he has been appointed as Captain of Science of the Topsector High Tech Systems and Materials by the Dutch Government. In 2011 he was awarded by STW to become Simon Stevin Meester 2011, for his achievements in technical sciences.  

• Professor Judith Driscoll, University of Cambridge, UK

 Professor Driscoll has been at the University of Cambridge in 2003. She has is also a Long Term visiting staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory.  She works on the materials science of functional oxide thin films and nanostructures, including superconductors, ferromagnetic, ferroelectric and multiferroics. She is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and also a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. She has around 250 journal publications.

• Professor Harold Hwang, Stanford University, USA
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Harold Y. Hwang is Professor of Applied Physics and Photon Science (SLAC) at Stanford University. He received a B.S. in Physics, B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from MIT (1993), and a Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University (1997). He was formerly a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs (1996-2003), Associate Professor and Professor at the University of Tokyo (2003-2010). His current research focuses on atomic-scale synthesis of thin film complex oxide heterostructures; control of the electronic structure at interfaces and in confined geometries; low-dimensional superconductivity; and novel devices based on interface and surface states in oxides. Awards include the MRS Outstanding Young Investigator Award (2005) and the IBM Japan Science Prize (Physics, 2008). 

• Dr Marta Gibert Gutiérrez, University of Geneva
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Marta Gibert Gutiérrez graduated in Physics by the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2004 (Spain). She obtained her Ph D. title in Material Science in 2009 under the supervision of Prof. Teresa Puig and Prof. Xavier Obradors at ICMAB-CSIC (Spain).  The main topic of her Ph. D. research was the generation of strain-induced self-assembled oxide nanostructures by chemical solution deposition, and their application to induce artificial vortex pinning centers in YBa2Cu3O7 thin films. During her PhD, she was as a visiting scientist in Cambridge (UK), IFW-Dresden (Germany) and Los Alamos (USA). In 2010 she moved as a postdoc in Triscone’s group in University of Geneva (Switzerland), where she is currently working on nickelate-based oxide interfaces.  Her work includes close collaborations with several experimental groups and theoreticians. Despite her short scientific career she has already published more than 10 papers in scientific journals and has contributed to several international conferences.  

• Professor Craig Fennie, Cornell University, USA
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Craig J. Fennie is currently an Assistant Professor in the School of Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University. He received his BEE and MSEE degrees from Villanova, and his PhD in theoretical condensed matter physics from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey in 2006, working in the group of Prof. Karin Rabe.  Upon graduation, he was awarded the Nicholas Metropolis Fellowship from Argonne National Laboratory. Since June 2008 he has been faculty at Cornell University, where he continues working in the field of multifunctional materials-by-design, specifically on the application of first-principles methods to understand and to discover new ferroelectrics and multiferroics. He is the recipient of the 2010 Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office and the 2011 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation. 

• Professor Evgeny Tsymbal, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA
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Evgeny Tsymbal is a Charles Bessey Professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and the Director of the UNL’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). Prior to his appointment at UNL he was a research scientist at University of Oxford, a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the Research Center-Jülich, Germany, and a research scientist at the Russian Research Center ‘Kurchatov Institute’, Moscow. Evgeny Tsymbal’s research is focused on computational materials science aiming at the understanding of fundamental properties of advanced ferromagnetic and ferroelectric nanostructures and materials relevant to nanoelectronics and spintronics. Evgeny Tsymbal is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a fellow of the Institute of Physics, UK. 

• Professor Ramamoorthy Ramesh, University of California, Berkley, California
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Professor Ramesh graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Ph. D. in 1987.  He returned to Berkeley in 2004 and is currently the Plato Malozemoff Chair Professor in Materials Science and Physics. Prior to that he was Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland College Park. From 1989-1995, at Bellcore, he initiated research in several key areas of oxide electronics, including ferroelectric nonvolatile memories.  His landmark contributions in ferroelectrics came through the recognition that conducting oxide electrodes are the solution to the problem of polarization fatigue, which for 30 years, remained an enigma and unsolved problem. In 1994, in collaboration with S. Jin (Lucent Technologies), he initiated research into manganite thin films and they coined the term, Colossal Magnetoresistive (CMR) Oxides. At Berkeley, he continues to pursue key scientific and technological problems in complex multifunctional oxide thin films, nanostructures and heterostructures. His group demonstrated the existence of a large ferroelectric polarization in multiferroic BiFeO3 films, in agreement with first principle predictions; they also demonstrated electric field control of antiferromagnetism as well as ferromagnetism, a critical step towards the next generation of storage and spintronics devices that are completely electric field controlled. His current research interests include thermoelectric and photovoltaic energy conversion in complex oxide heterostructures. He has published extensively on the synthesis and materials physics of complex oxide materials.  He received the Humboldt Senior Scientist Prize and Fellowship to the American Physical Society (2001). In 2005, he was elected a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as the David Adler Lectureship of the American Physical Society. In 2007, he was awarded the Materials Research Society David Turnbull Lectureship Award and  in 2009, he was elected Fellow of MRS and is the recipient of the 2010 APS McGroddy New Materials Prize. 

• Professor Chang-Beom Eom, University of Wisconsin, USA
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 Chang-Beom Eom is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Stanford University in 1991 and spent two years at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill and then joined Duke University in 1993, being tenured in 1996. He joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2000. His main research interest is epitaxial thin films and heterostructures of complex oxides, including ferroelectrics, piezoelectrics, multiferroics, two-dimensional electron gas at the oxide hetero-interfaces and superconductors, with a focus in understanding fundamental solid state phenomena and developing novel device applications. He received a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award in 1994 and a David Lucile Packard Fellowship in 1995.  He is the 2007 recipient of the Ho-Am Prize in Engineering and is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Materials Research Society. 

• Dr Ivan Bozovic, Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA
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Ivan Bozovic has a Ph.D. in Solid State Physics 1975 from the Belgrade University, Yugoslavia. From 1975 to 1985 he work as Docent to Department Head at Belgrade University;1986-8 Stanford University (Visiting Professor); 1989-98 Varian Research Center, Palo Alto (Senior Scientist); 1998-2002 Oxxel GmbH, Bremen, Germany (Principal Scientist and CTO); 2003- Brookhaven National Laboratory (MBE Group Leader). Ican Bozovic is a Fellow of APS, Fellow of SPIE, Foreign Member of Serbian Academy of Science and Arts; recipient of SPIE Technology Award, M. Jaric Prize, BNL Science and Technology Prize, Fulbright Fellowship.  His main interests are (1) Basic physics of condensed states of matter; (2) novel electronic phenomena including unconventional superconductivity (3) innovative methods of thin film synthesis and characterization for future nano-electronics; (4) mesoscopic (nano-scale) physics. 

• Dr Quanxi Jia, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA
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Quanxi Jia is a Fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory and a Thrust Leader at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies. Quanxi received his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Xian Jiaotong University, China, in 1982 and 1985 respectively, and his PhD in the same field from the State University of New York, Buffalo, in 1991. Quanxi has authored/co-authored over 350 refereed journal articles and 8 book chapters. He has 35 US patents awarded in electronic materials and devices. Among the numerous awards and honours he has received are two prestigious R&D 100 awards, the 2005 Asian-American Engineer of the Year Award, and the Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer Awards for Excellence in Technology Transfer. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society. His research interests include nanostructured materials, multifunctional materials, multilayer systems and the development of solid-state microelectronic/electro-optic devices. 

• Professor Darrell Schlom, Cornell University, USA
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Darrell Schlom is the Hebert Fisk Johnson Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University.  He received a B.S. degree from Caltech and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University.  Following a post-doc at IBM Zurich he joined the faculty at Penn State University where he spent 16 years before moving to Cornell in 2008.  His research interests involve the replacement of SiO₂ as the gate dielectric in MOSFETs and the heteroepitaxial growth and characterization of oxide thin films, including their epitaxial integration with semiconductors.  His group synthesizes oxide heterostructures using molecular-beam epitaxy.  He has published over 350 papers and 8 patents resulting in an h-index of 49 and over 10,000 citations.  He received young investigator awards from ONR and NSF, an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, and the MRS Medal.  He is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society.   

• Dr Rossitza Pentcheva, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany
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Dr Rossitza Pentcheva is a research associate and group leader at the University of Munich. She studied Theoretical Physics at the University of Cologne and the Institute for Solid State Research (Research Center Jülich) and completed her PhD at the Fritz Haber Institute and the Free University Berlin where she investigated the growth and stability of low dimensional transition metal hetero­structures and thin films based on electronic structure calculations. After a stay as a visiting scientist at the University of California at Davis she built up a group in Computational Materials Science at the University of Munich. Her research focuses on understanding and predicting novel electronic phenomena at transition metal oxide surfaces and interfaces. 

• Professor Thirumalai Venkatesan, National University of Singapore, Singapore
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Professor T. Venkatesan is currently the Director of the Nano Institute at the National University of Singapore where he is a Professor of ECE and Physics. He wore various hats at Bell Labs and Bellcore for about 17 years before becoming a Professor at University of Maryland for another 17 years. As the inventor of the pulsed laser deposition (PLD) process, he has over 500 papers and 30 patents in the area of Oxide thin films and is globally among the top one hundred physicists in terms of his citations. He has graduated over 27 PhD and over 50 undergraduate students. He is also the founder and Chairman of Neocera, a company specializing in the area of PLD and magnetic field imaging. He is a Fellow of the APS, winner of the Bellcore Award of excellence, Fellow of the World Innovation Forum and was a member of the Physics Policy Committee and the Board of Visitors at UMD. He is currently the Chairman, Forum of Industry and Applications of Physics at APS. 

• Professor Tae Won Noh, Seoul National University, Korea
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Tae Won Noh is a Professor of Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University. He received his PhD in 1986 from Ohio State University and did postdoctoral research at Cornell University. His research is focused on complex functional oxides, such as ferroelectric materials and resistive switching materials. He is particularly interested in the interfacial phenomena of oxides, which can lead to a novel functionality. He has published more than 300 SCI papers, including 35 Physical Review Letters and one paper in Nature, which have been cited more than 7000 times collectively. He has served on a number of international conferences. He is currently working as a vice president of Korean Physical Society and editor-in-chief of Current Applied Physics. He received several awards, and he became a Fellow of American Physical Society in 2009. Last year, he was selected as a National Honor Scientist, only one in physics, by Korean Government. 

• Dr Manuel Bibes, Thales Research and Technology, France
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Born in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande (Gironde, France) in 1976, Manuel Bibes is a research scientist at the joint CNRS/Thales laboratory in Palaiseau. He received his Ph.D. in 2001 from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the INSA Toulouse after a joint Franco-Spanish thesis on manganite interfaces at the Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona. Following two years of postdoctoral work with A. Fert’s group in Orsay he became a CNRS researcher and joined the Institute of Fundamental Electronics at the University Paris-Sud in 2003. In 2007, he returned to the CNRS/Thales lab to develop research lines on multiferroics, oxide interfaces and ferroic tunnel junctions. He is the coauthor of more than 90 articles in international journals including several reviews and of three books.  

• Professor Manfred Fiebig, Universitaet Bonn, Germany
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Manfred Fiebig is Professor at the Helmholtz Institute for Radiation and Nuclear Physics at the University of Bonn, Germany. His main research topic is looking at systems with strong electronic correlations which he probes by nonlinear laser-optical techniques. Particular fields of interest are magnetoelectric interactions in systems with multiple ferroic order and ultrafast magnetization processes. Professor Fiebig received his PhD in 1996 from the University of Dortmund, Germany. From 1997 to 1999 he worked in the Department of Applied Physics at the University of Tokyo, Japan, as a Fellow of the Japan Science and Technology Corporation. Following an intermission at the University of Dortmund from 1999 to 2001, he moved to the Max Born Institute of Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy in 2002 as Heisenberg Fellow of the DFG. In 2006, he was appointed to a professorship at the University of Bonn where he has been working ever since. 

• Professor Chris McConville, University of Warwick, UK
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Chris McConville is Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Warwick.  His research interests broadly cover the surface and interface properties of both conventional and novel semiconducting materials. His research group use a range of surface sensitive electron and ion spectroscopy techniques to extract both physical and electronic structure information to compare with the bulk properties of materials. In particular he has pioneered surface studies of III-nitrides, III-N-V’s and several oxide materials (including ZnO, In₂O₃ & CdO), now collectively referred to as highly mismatched compounds (HMC’s). He has delivered over 110 invited lectures and seminars at national and international conferences, workshops and research institutions world-wide, published more than 220 papers in refereed journals along with 3 book chapters, and he has a personal h-index of 32.  He is also co-editor of Indium Nitride and Related Alloys (Taylor Francis Publishers, 2009) and was recipient of the British Vacuum Council’s Senior Prize and John Yarwood Memorial Medal in 2007. 

• Panel Discussion and Overview
• Audio recording (mp3)