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MAMA is a European project coordinated by the CNR-SPIN in order to coordinate and support actions for high quality RTD activities. The project involves ten partners and is funded by the European Community under the program FP7-RegPot2010-1 [link].
Overview
Multifunctional materials are defined as those materials that perform specific functions other than possessing a load bearing capacity. Examples include semiconductors, magnetic materials, piezoelectrics and ionic conductors. In this context, transition metal oxides (TMOs) have been attracting an ever-increasing interest, due to the wide variety of physical properties that they exhibit, including unconventional superconductivity, piezo- and ferro-electricity, colossal magnetoresistance, multiferroicity and a number of exotic magnetic, charge and orbital orderings.
Furthermore, oxide interface can show properties at the nanometer scale that are qualitatively different from their single building blocks, allowing to engineer novel functionalities by resorting to the controlled growth of epitaxial heterostructures. Still, the analysis and modelling of hybrid heterostructures, where layers of functional organic materials, with impressing similarities with oxides in their transport mechanisms, represents an ultimate and even more ambitious challenge. Such features are believed to open the route to the fabrication of device prototypes where multiple functionalities of TMOs and functional organic layers are nano-integrated on the same chip. The range of application sectors is incredibly wide, including: information and communication technology, energy generation, storage and transport.
Within the MAMA project, CNR-SPIN team aims at upgrading the research potential to face the scientific challenge behind the complexity of multifunctional advanced materials and nanoscale phenomena. By exploiting the available partnerships expertises and experimental endowment, complemented by the new resources provided within the project, the CNR-SPIN aims at achieving the highest level of competitiveness about issues of i) materials fabrication, by addressing the growth of very high quality samples in the different forms of epitaxial thin films and single crystals, also integrated together in complex heterostructures and ii) advanced material characterizations, both based on matter-light interaction (by resorting either to advanced laser applications or to synchrotron sources), on scanning probe techniques and on electron-magnetic transport, as well as about iii) theoretical modelling and advanced multi-scale computation to analyze and get insight into different physical properties of innovative materials.
Involved Institutions
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University of Naples |
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University of Salerno |
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