design & Control of spIn, orbiTal and chaRge Orders in vaNadates – CITRON

The ever-increasing development of information technologies raises not only the question of the energy supply of the electronic devices but also of handling a massive number of operations and managing multiple collections of data. Besides the needs for innovative renewable energy sources and miniaturized electrical energy storages, less energy-intensive multifunctional materials, combined with new short time scales response properties, have also become a major challenge for containing the power consumption for rapid data processing. Owing to their versatility and multiple properties, through the interactions between the different degrees of freedom of the electrons (spin, orbital and charge), transition metal oxides are highly promising to face the growing demand of functional scalability. The multifunctional character of transition metal oxides with a perovskite structure meets the first requirement, i.e. enhancing a device by adding new functionalities. Then, the multiple states or spin orders that characterize the magnetic properties of oxides satisfy the need to encode collections of data. At last, the spin dynamics in oxide antiferromagnets occurs at very high frequency, which makes them attractive materials for ultrafast devices. Upstream of the innovative architectures suitable for information processing, CITRON aims at exploring new paradigms and designs of multiferroic oxide-based systems at the nanometer scale towards potentially short time scale spin dynamics.