Understanding defects in metal-oxide materials

We are surrounded by metal-oxide materials, from everyday devices such as phones and computers, to the many natural minerals which make up our planet. Metal-oxides are finding an incredibly diverse range of technological applications in areas such as electronics, energy generation, catalysis and medicine. For many of these applications atomic-scale defects in the oxide materials (such as vacancies, impurities and grain boundaries) control performance. Materials modelling can provide invaluable insights into the role of defects which are often challenging to unravel by experiment alone. In this talk I will present a number of examples from our recent research including the effect of grain boundaries on electron mobility in nanocrystalline TiO2, interdiffusion in CoFeB/MgO thin films and antiphase boundary defects in the magnetic oxide Fe3O4 .