Why study metal oxides?

We are now devoting a fair amount of our time to study metal oxides. Why? Metal oxides are a family of materials that provide a wide range of physical scenarios. They show rich phase diagrams reflecting the interplay between magnetite diverse atomic scale processes which may lead to singular properties and that places oxides among the most attractive multifunctional materials. The use of oxides is of particular interest in nanoscale technologies. The high quality growth of oxide thin films and heterostructures, when combined to the versatility of oxide properties, opens the path to a large number of applications in oxide electronics, like field effect transistors (FETs) based on the metal-insulator Mott transition, or spintronics, whose development largely relies in miniaturized oxide systems either showing half-metallicity or multiferroism.

The understanding and control of all these exotic properties constitutes at present both a challenge and a promising path to the discovery of new physical phenomena and their application in novel technologies. In order to do so, a close look at atomic scale processes is needed. However, it is difficult to disentangle the structural and electronic degrees of freedom, and their relation to other physical effects involving dynamical response, magnetism or conductivity. We aim to provide such information by obtaining insight into several fundamental problems on oxide systems combining theoretical and experimental methodologies:

How do ultrathin oxide films grow and how the growth can be controlled?
Which oxide surface defects are relevant and affect chemical activity?
How do the electronic interactions change? And how are magnetism and conductivity affected?
Which new phenomena arise in oxide surfaces and interfaces and how are they originated?