John Heron

RESEARCH INTERESTS:

My research focuses on the epitaxial growth of complex oxide thin films and heterostructures in the pursuit to uncover, understand, and engineer new electronic phenomena and to push the frontier of technology with next generation devices based on these materials. The complex oxides offer an extremely wide range of properties not observed in conventional compound semiconductors and, thus, are an exciting playground for investigating or tailoring exotic phenomena and exploiting the unusual behavior in devices. Our group will employ a high vacuum, in-situ transfer system between sputtering and pulsed laser deposition chambers to enable the high quality, epitaxial growth of a wide variety of oxide and metal systems. Particular interest resides in interface, spin, structure, and charge effects that occur in layered structures with ferroic (and antiferroic) materials, such as (anti)ferromagnets, (anti)ferroelectrics, and multiferroics. We use a wide variety of techniques to explore these materials. These include X-ray diffraction, scanning probe microscopy (AFM, PFM, MFM), ferroelectric testing, magnetotransport, direct and converse magnetoelectric measurements, and magnetometry.