UC San Diego

Two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) formed at the interface between two insulating perovskite oxides has provided a versatile playground to explore emergent interfacial electronic and magnetic properties. In this thesis our efforts centered on studying the electronic and structural properties of different 2DEG heterostructures (HS), with the goal of designing novel 2DEG HS using first-principles methods.

In the first project we studied the δ-doping effects on the electronic and energetic properties of LaAlO3/SrTiO3 HS with 23 transition-metal (TM) dopants. It has been found that there is a trade-off between achieving small electron effective mass and obtaining an energetically favorable TM-doped LaAlO3/SrTiO3 system. More importantly, in addition to the experimentally confirmed Mn dopant, we proposed that Fe, Co, Ni, Ru, Rh, Pd, Os and Ir elements can also be promising dopants to yield light effective mass bands and good energetic stability.

In the second project we compared the electronic and energetic properties of TiO2/LaAlO3 and LaAlO3/TiO2 HS. We found that TiO2/LaAlO3 is intrinsically metallic and has a larger interfacial charge carrier density, smaller electron effective mass and a stronger interface cohesion than LaAlO3/TiO2, which shows an insulator-to-metal transition at 4 unit cells of LaAlO3.

In the third project we introduced a hitherto unknown 2DEG formed at the interface between spinel MgAl2O4 and SrTiO3. Our integrated approach combining experimental mea- surements and first-principles calculations reveals that an atomic-thin interfacial Ti-Al-O layer with a thickness of about 4 A ̊ is key to the observed metallic transport. The 2DEG observed at spinel/perovskite interface implies the existence of emergent phenomena at the interfaces between spinel group minerals and perovskite oxides.

In the fourth and fifth project we explored the possibility of creating 2DEG in nonpo- lar/nonpolar perovskite oxide HS. We found that the lattice-mismatch-induced compression strain from the substrate leads to a large polarization in the film, which then drives the charge transfer from the film to the substrate and results in a 2DEG at the interface. In addition, by using high-throughput first-principles calculations and a group of combinatory descriptors, we rapidly designed more than 300 novel nonpolar/nonpolar 2DEG HS.

In the final project we introduced Grain Boundary Maker (GBMaker), an efficient and open-source Python library for generating atomic coordinates in periodic grain boundary models. It is designed to construct various grain boundary structures from cubic and non-cubic initial configurations. GBMaker is expected to greatly accelerate the theoretical investigation of grain boundary properties and facilitate the experimental analysis of grain boundary structures as well.