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.
