icmab
Why this Roadmap?
Why oxides?
"The introductory paper ''A unique exploration" sharply clarifies that, at the closing of a technological era prevalently dominated by silicon (Si), oxides open the whole periodic table as the playground of tomorrow's materials scientists." And not only this; even under minimal chemical variations or at a fixed composition, a wide range of different properties in oxides can be obtained due to the diversity in the structure, thickness, strain, grain boundaries, or interfaces.
Why Transition Metal oxides?
Transition Metal oxides present the richest variety of emergent states. New paradigms are needed to tackle their theoretical understanding, as explained in the second introductory contribution (''What theoretical approaches can provide: a perspective on oxides electronics"), to both interpret the experimental data and foresee the properties of not-yet-synthesized materials.
What is the purpose of the article?
The purpose of the paper ''Towards Oxide Electronics: a Roadmap" is to address directly some crucial questions regarding functional oxide thin films:
- What is the future role of oxide thin film in modern technologies?
- How far are oxides from taking this role?
- Which are the competing technologies?
- Which are the hurdles presently preventing the diffusion of marketable applications?
- Which are the chances these hurdles can be overcome?
- Which are the advancement in synthesis and characterization methods that can help us facing them?
The authors from the ICMAB are in yellow: M. Coll, J. Fontcuberta, I. Fina, C. Frontera, G. Herranz, F. Sánchez.
What can we find in it?
The compendium is divided into three sections: Introduction, Methods and Applications, preceded by a Preface.
The Methods part includes insights from theory and modelling, methods of thin film growth including pulsed laser deposition (PLD), molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), atomic layer deposition (ALD), and advanced characterization tools comprising point defect sensitive techniques, at a late stage in development of electron microscopy and thin film structure solving and refining by X-ray diffraction.
Most of the Applications presented in the paper are expected to impact the fields of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and Energy. Some of the applications are on data storage and computing, optics and plasmonics, magnonics, energy conversion and harvesting and power electronics. The applications are focused explicitly on thin-film-based applications, and when possible on epitaxial films.
More information:
Download the Open Access paper here.
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