Research Activities

Artificial stacking of different epitaxial complex oxides film is the new route to new physical phenomena, new functional interfaces and new materials. The pulsed-laser-deposition (PLD) method have used and further developed for this purpose relies on the laser-induced ablation of stoichiometric metal-oxide targets and allows accurate control of the layer thickness and sequence, in recent years down to monolayer precision. [more]

Due to the delicate interplay of spin-, charge- and orbital- degrees of freedom with the lattice in complex oxides we investigate the macroscopic properties of manganites (resistivity, magnetism) as a function of epitaxial strain and explore subsequently mechanisms of strain relaxation. [more]

Our activities in exploring transient and persistent photoconductivity (PPC) in complex oxide thin films are directed towards an external manipulation of electronic phase separation and the attempt to use photoconductivity studies as a potential tool to identify defects in the cation as well as in the anion sublattices in selected complex oxides. [more]

Worldwide activities in thermoelectrics have been snowballing during the past 5 years mainly initiated by a wide spread of applications ranging from cooling devices, energy harvesting from waste heat, power generation from sunlight to radioisotope thermoelectric generators in remote unmanned facilities in space. [more]

Whereas the progress in understanding of the interface physics between oxides with antagonistic long range order [e.g. ferromagnetism (F) and high temperature superconductivity (HTS)] has been made during past years ^[1,2], little is known about feasibility of fabrication oxide HTS-F-HTS Josephson junctions and subsequent exploration of their properties. [more]

The dependence of the conduction properties of complex oxides thin films on the oxygen stoichiometry is well established. Usually, the oxygen concentration can be changed by post-deposition, ex-situ annealing treatments performed in different oxygen reactive atmospheres. [more]