Emerging physics of oxide heterostructures

We explore novel electronic phenomena that occur at the interface in epitaxial complex oxide heterostructures. We apply ab-initio theory to predict and analyze the behavior of these heterostructures and use molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) to realize them in practice. Our first system concerns the interface between two insulating oxides, LaAlO3/SrTiO3 and LaAlO3/EuO. Formation of a two-dimensional electron gas is explored and the electrostatic doping mechanism as a result of the macroscopic electric fields in LaAlO3 is proposed. In the second system, we investigate the possibility of magnetoelectric coupling at a tri-components ferroelectric/ferromagnetic interface using a Pt/PbTiO3/Fe heterostructure as an example. At last we explore the connection between epitaxial strain and interfacial ferromagnetism in SrTiO3/LaCoO3 interface and demonstrate that such structure can be integrated epitaxially with Si (001).