Researchers from the Institut de Ciència de Materials de Barcelona (ICMAB-CSIC) and ALBA Synchrotron have led a collaborative research, together with the Institut Català de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia (ICN2), the Dept. of Electronics and Biomedical Engineering (University of Barcelona) and CIC nanoGUNE (Donostia), where they have exploited X-ray absorption spectroscopy at the BOREAS beamline of ALBA for unveiling the optical and spin transport properties of transition metal oxides for photovoltaics and spintronics applications.
There is an urgent need of metallic and transparent electrodes for applications in advanced technologies such as flat panel displays or electrodes for photovoltaics, that may substitute the ubiquitous and exceedingly expensive and scarce Indium-Tin oxide (ITO). The AMO3 perovskites (being A an alkaline earth and M an early 3d transition metal, e.g. SrVO3) are driving attention because their intrinsic metallic character combines with the strong electron correlation within the narrow 3d band, to produce a material having its plasma frequency down to infrared and thus transparent at visible range.
>Read more on the ALBA website
Image: Illustration of different phenomena occurring at the interface between a ferromagnetic insulator and a heavy metal.