Spectroscopies of Complex Materials
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PI:s: doc. Matti Lindroos and doc. Jouko Nieminen
A rich variety of novel classes of materials have sprouted up during recent decades. Not only they provide scientific challenges for experimentalists and theorists, but there exist high expectations about their technological applications. Elevating the critical temperature, as well as critical field and current, of high temperature superconductors would solve technological problems related to transformers, motors or power transmission with low losses, creating strong magnetic fields
or developing probes for measuring magnetic fields with extremely high accuracy. Nanometre scale electronics would benefit from manipulation of electronic structure of adsorbate molecules by functionalizing groups. On the other hand, the electronic properties of graphene and other carbon based nanostructures such as fullerenes or nanotubes have proven tunable in a quite versatile way. Most recently, the Spin Quantum Hall Effect as a physical phenomena, and topological insulators as the related class of materials, anticipate innovations in the field of spintronics.
In the SCM group we apply quantum mechanical methods to simulate quasiparticle structure and experimental spectra of complex materials. Our research is closely related to corresponding experimental work. Our research topics vary from Scanning Tunneling Microscopy/Spectroscopy (STM/STS), to Angular Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES) and Low Energy Electron Diffraction (LEED). As for the materials, the emphasis has been on high temperature superconductors (HTS), such as Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8 , molecules adsorbed on metal surfaces, which are either bare or covered by ultrathin insulating layers. We have recently expanded our repetoir to more exotic materials, such as topological insulators (Bi2Te3), where the interpretation of both the experiments and the calculations is theoretically very challenging, and especially simulating spectroscopies of these materials requires insightful tailor-made quantum physical modeling.