The FINO Lab will be hitting the road for a trip to Orlando to present our ongoing work at the American Ceramics Society Electronic Materials and Applications conference! Look for Miles Blanchet’s talk on Mn-based spinels from our ongoing NSF project on oxide films for hybrid catalysts and Suresh Thapa’s presentation on surface studies of…Continue Reading FINO Lab Heads to ACERS Electronic Materials and Applications 2019

Our collaborative paper on LaMnO3 (LMO)/SrTiO3 (STO) interfaces has been published in Advanced Materials Interfaces. This work, led by Dr. Tiffany Kaspar at Pacific Northwest National Lab, explores changes to Mn valence in LMO at the interface with STO, showing that Mn is partially reduced to a 2+ valence at the interface due to the…Continue Reading Collaborative Paper on LaMnO3-SrTiO3 Interfaces Published in Advanced Materials Interfaces

Our newest paper is out in Physical Review B, focusing on interfacial electronic behavior in SrTiO3-LaCrO3 superlattices. Dr. Comes synthesized these samples at PNNL and Prof. Chuck Fadley’s group at UC Davis performed synchrotron standing-wave x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy measurements to probe how the interfaces led to a built-in electric potential gradient across the layers of the…Continue Reading Paper on SrTiO3-LaCrO3 Superlattices Published in PRB

Dr. Comes presented an invited talk at the Gordon Conference on Defects in Semiconductors at Colby-Sawyer College last week discussing the role that defects play at the LaFeO3-SrTiO3 interface and presenting some of the first results from the new FINO Lab MBE and XPS. It was a great crowd and lively discussion!…Continue Reading Dr. Comes Presents Invited Talk at Gordon Conference

After some hard work by all of our graduate students and some valuable help from Randy Dellwo at RBD Instruments, we have our monochromatic XPS system attached to the MBE and are up and running!…Continue Reading First XPS Measurements

Our collaborative project with Prof. Byron Farnum in the Auburn Chemistry department was awarded from the Solid State and Materials Chemistry program at NSF! Over this three year project, we’ll be looking at epitaxial spinel and perovskite thin films to understand their physical and chemical behaviors as catalysts and then integrating them into nanocomposites to…Continue Reading FINO Lab Gets NSF Grant for Studies of Oxide Nanocomposites for Catalysis

Our new (refurbished) PHI 5400 XPS has arrived from RBD Instruments! The monochromatic XPS will be attached to our MBE in May during installation and complete our laboratory construction. We will be the only university in the United States with a combination of hybrid oxide molecular beam epitaxy and in situ x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The…Continue Reading XPS Delivered!

FINO Lab undergraduate student Will Bowers had a great month of March with three big events coming back-to-back-to-back. First, Will was accepted into the Penn State Materials Physics REU program, where he will be working with Prof. Long-Qing Chen over the summer. He also presented a poster on his work for the past year in…Continue Reading Big Month of March for Will Bowers

Our collaborative paper on La2Ti2O7 thin films led by Dr. Tiffany Kaspar at Pacific Northwest National Lab has been published in Scientific Reports. In this work, we explore the ordering of oxygen interstitial ions to form the layered perovskite-related structure and study its ferroelectric and piezoelectric properties. These materials are exceptionally challenging to synthesize but have…Continue Reading Paper on La2Ti2O7 Thin Films Published in Scientific Reports

Dr. Comes and undergraduate student Will Bowers took a road trip to Milledgeville, GA before Thanksgiving break to attend the Southeastern Section of the American  Physical Society meeting. Will presented his poster studying the preparation and surface properties of Nb-doped SrTiO3 substrates done in collaboration with former REU student Patrick Gemperline. Congrats Will! Dr. Comes organized…Continue Reading FINO Lab at SESAPS