260098 VO Electronic and magnetic properties of Transition Metal Oxides (2017S)

Inorganic compounds of transition metal ions, most notably their oxides, form a class of compounds with a uniquely diverse range of physical properties, exhibiting many exciting and often intriguing phenomena: these include magnetism, insulator-metal transitions, charge and orbital ordering, semiconducting properties and chemical reactivity. This wealth of properties makes these compounds useful in many applications such as catalysis, electronic, optoelectronic and spintronic. The initial part of this course aims to provide a comprehensive description of the physics of TMOs and will involve two complementary parts: (i) Theory and (ii) Experiment. The theory part will focus on the basic phenomenological and model description of TMOs, in particular based on the crystal field theory and tight-binding approximation, while elucidating critical and often counterintuitive roles played by Coulomb interactions and other energy scales relevant to the problem in determining properties of this class of compounds. The second part will include a selection of the most important experimental techniques, primarily related to the class of techniques often termed together as high-energy spectroscopies, used to study the electronic and magnetic properties of these compounds. Having established a language to describe and rationalise varied electronic and magnetic properties of these systems in terms of generic features of the broad theoretical framework in the first part, we shall then discuss in detail several specific examples of systems with diverse intriguing properties and explore how one may attempt to understand their mysteries with a combination of experiment and theory.