Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

This grant application proposes the acquisition and installation of a high pressure Reflection High-Energy Electron Diffraction (RHEED) system onto an existing custom-designed pulsed-laser ablation deposition (PLD) chamber. This in-situ characterisation tool will help monitor the surface of thin films during their growth. The information obtained will allow us to better control the growth processes in order to improve significantly the quality of the epitaxial thin films and even to target specific termination layers of the materials. Thus, it will play a major role in the control of the interface between two successive materials deposited in multilayered electronic devices that could exhibit exotic novel behaviours. All the projects will involve oxide-based thin films. Some of these projects target the origin of high temperature superconductivity and their possible harnessing into simple electronic components when combining them to other oxide materials like colossal magnetoresistance manganites. For example, we will attempt to grow multilayers with artificially-induced superconductivity.