Symposium ES10—Frontiers in Oxide Interface Spintronics—Magnetoelectrics, Multiferroics and Spin-Orbit Effects

Transition metal alloys and, more recently, heavy elemental (4d and 5d) metals have become the strategic elements of spintronic devices and applications. With the recent progress in fabrication and characterization techniques, complex oxide thin films have taken major roles in the frontiers of device physics and engineering. The complex oxides have offered an extremely wide range of properties not realized in conventional metals or semiconductors. For instance, they can exhibit a ferroelectric polar state, magnetic order, metal-insulator transition, colossal magnetoresistance and (predicted) topological insulator phases. In some cases, these properties or order parameters can coexist in single-phase materials, an example being multiferroics: ferroelectric, insulating magnets (anti-ferromagnets).

Due to their correlated nature and multiple degrees of freedom, the properties of this class of materials can be controlled by chemical substitution or by external stimuli such as electric, magnetic and strain fields. Furthermore, spin-orbit effects are the fundamental ingredients, which control magnetoelectric coupling in multiferroics and magnetotransport or magneto-optical effects in spin-Hall or topological insulators. In reduced dimensions, surface phenomena can dominate over bulk and thus become a key tuning parameter. Therefore, heterointerface engineering of complex oxides offers the possibility of the emergence of non-bulk-like exotic phenomena, which could improve or add novel functionalities to spintronics applications. This symposium will focus on the interdisciplinary topics related to the physics, materials science and engineering within the field of spintronics at oxide interfaces.

The topical list for this symposium reflects the materials needs and challenges within the field, with emphasis on the fabrication of thin films and heterostructures, properties, devices, and exploratory materials. Invited speakers will span the breadth of these interdisciplinary topics in order to accelerate the understanding and development of these topics to enable new functionalities in spintronics devices by exploiting the rich physics of complex oxides.