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Lab Tour: Quantum Oxide Layers Lab

Brian Sandalow

Opened in the winter of 2025, the Quantum Oxide Layers Lab is where Jennifer Fowlie studies transition metal oxides, advanced materials that show unusual quantum behaviors.

Fowlie, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, and her research team work to create these special materials in precise ways at nanoscale. By combining careful materials design with advanced tools that measure magnetic, electronic, nuclear, and optical properties, they gather insights into how quantum materials behave in electronic applications from touchscreens to quantum information processing platforms.

A tube furnace plays a quiet but essential role in shaping transition metal oxides before and after they are grown as thin films. The long, horizontal chamber heats samples to high temperatures under carefully controlled conditions. Whether preparing targets for pulsed laser deposition or refining newly grown films, the furnace ensures the precise crystal structure and chemistry that experiments demand.

By introducing oxygen or other gases into a heated environment, researchers adjust oxygen levels and observe corresponding changes in conductivity.

What distinguishes this tube furnace is not only its control of atmosphere and temperature, but its ability to measure electrical properties in real time as reactions occur. By flowing oxygen or other gases through the heated chamber, the team fine-tunes oxygen content while tracking changes in conductivity. For transition metal oxides, even small shifts in oxygen stoichiometry can dramatically alter magnetic and electronic behavior, making this in situ measurement critical.

The pulsed laser deposition chamber is the starting point for every sample of transition metal oxides. Oxygen-metal compounds with unusual electronic and magnetic behavior, these materials naturally form ceramic crystals—hard, brittle solids with a regular, repeating 3D arrangement of atoms that gives a crystal its structure and properties.

In a highly controlled process, the system grows thin layers of these crystals, one sample at a time, with each run taking a few hours.

Jennifer Fowlie, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, looks into the pulsed laser deposition chamber.

A high-powered laser strikes a solid target containing the exact chemical composition. The material vaporizes into a plume and deposits onto a carefully selected crystalline substrate, where it reforms as a precisely structured atomic layer.

The target must match the desired chemical composition precisely, and the substrate determines how the crystal will align as it grows. By changing the target or the substrate, the team can systematically engineer different structures while keeping the rest of the environment constant. That level of control is essential when working with transition metal oxides, the magnetic and electronic properties of which are extremely sensitive to small structural changes.

Every transition metal oxide sample begins here. In a tightly controlled growth process, the system deposits thin crystalline layers one sample at a time. Each fabrication cycle lasts several hours.

Lab Tour: Quantum Oxide Layers Lab

Lab Tour: Quantum Oxide Layers Lab

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