After graduating with honors in solid state physics in 2017 from the University of Milan-Bicocca, in 2021 Dr. Longo successfully defended his doctoral thesis in the field of spintronics, earning the title of Doctor of Science and Nanotechnology of Materials at the same university, within a collaboration with the Institute of Microelectronics and Microsystem in Agrate-Brianza of the Italian national council of research (CNR-IMM). From 2021 to July 2023, he was postdoctoral research fellow at the CNR-IMM in the framework of the SKYTOP European project.  

During his PhD activity and first postdoctoral activity, Dr. Longo studied the chemical-physical interactions between an exotic phase of matter known as “topological insulator” and ferromagnetic materials, with the aim to produce efficient spintronic devices for memory storage and logic applications. In particular, he investigated the properties of topological systems when used to convert spin currents into charge currents (and vice versa). He contributed to develop an industrially compatible deposition process to produce Sb2Te3 topological insulator thin films on 4’’ silicon wafers, demonstrating their remarkable spin-to-charge current conversion efficiency.

Here at ICMAB, Dr. Longo carries out under supervision of Prof. Fontcuberta a fundamental study of the detection, and characterization of orbital currents in early transition metals metallic oxides, activity which lies in the framework of the so-called “spinorbitronics”. The possibility to use light materials and their exceptional transport properties make the orbital currents very promising to be exploited in the future micro- and nano- electronic devices.

Dr. Gabriele De Luca is a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC) since January 2023. He performed his undergraduate studies in Physics in Napoli and received his Ph.D. degree in Materials Science from ETH Zürich in 2017. Later, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zürich between 2018-2021 and a visiting researcher in University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2019. He was then awarded a SNF Postdoc.Mobility grant (Swiss equivalent to MSCA) to work in the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2) between 2021-2022. His research focuses on the growth and characterization of complex oxide heterostructures and the evolution of their functional properties at the nanoscale.

Research Area

• Transition metal oxides are considered to be the perfect candidate for the development of cheap, compact, green and energy-efficient devices because they are earth-abundant and can host a vast amount of electrical, magnetic, and optical properties. The structural quality of oxide heterostructures now rivals that of the best conventional semiconductors, allowing to envisage an oxide electronics era. However, for implementing such functional material systems in technological applications, it is necessary to understand how to control and engineer their properties at the nanoscale.
• In MULFOX, we investigate the evolution of these properties when two or more complex oxides are brought together. Various effects can take place including the change of lattice distortions (epitaxial strain), electrostatic coupling when materials with different polarity are involved (polar catastrophe), charge transfer via chemical potential shift, frustration due to sublattice connectivity (oxygen octahedra and tetrahedra), size effects due to reduced dimensionality, structure-periodicity tuning (superlattices) and so on. The idea is to explore the phase diagrams of complex oxide heterostructures to assemble the knowledge required for developing the technologies of tomorrow.

Silvia Damerio joined ICMAB-CSIC and the MAGNEPIC project as a Post-doc researcher in February 2022. She obtained her BSc(Hons) (2015) and MSc(Hons) (2017) in Chemistry from the University of Genova (Italy) and University of Groningen (the Netherlands), respectively. She subsequently joined the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials of the University of Groningen for her PhD, which she received in 2022 with a thesis about modulated phases in ferroic oxides. Her current research focuses on the study of the spin-flop transition in thin films of ferrimagnetic insulators grown by sputtering.

Email: sdamerio@icmab.es