Prof. Julia Mundy is one of 83 scientists from across the nation selected by Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science to receive significant funding for research as part of DOE’s Early Career Research Program. The effort, now in its twelfth year, is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early career years, when many scientists do their most formative work.
Award Abstract, Epitaxial Stabilization of Novel Superconductors for Energy Generation, Storage and Distribution:
Superconducting materials hold great promise for applications in energy generation, storage, and distribution. However, known superconductors still lack the transition temperatures, critical fields, or pairing symmetry to be fully exploited for these applications. This has not only continued to motivate the optimization of known superconducting materials, but further driven efforts for the discovery of new families of superconductors. This Early Career program will exploit the characteristics of the copper oxidebased superconductors as design criteria in the search for additional new materials that could host hightemperature superconductivity. The plan is to design, synthesize, and probe with atomic-scale precision metastable nickelate and cobaltate thin films. This work will tackle two intertwined synthesis challenges: 1) how does one control the local oxygen coordination and environment in a complex oxide material during synthesis and 2) how does one monitor and manipulate changes to the oxygen coordination postsynthesis. In both thrusts, new synthetic techniques are proposed that will allow reaching previously unexplored compounds. While the main work will focus on developing specific techniques for the stabilization and exploration of hypothesized superconductors, it is notable that the ability to create novel oxygen coordination environments should have broader impacts for a variety of non-perovskite oxide materials.
Prof. Mundy's research was selected for funding by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences.