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Darrell Schlom

Herbert Fisk Johnson Professor of Industrial Chemistry
Materials Science and Engineering

Biography

Darrell Schlom is the Herbert Fisk Johnson Professor of Industrial Chemistry in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University. After receiving a B.S. degree from Caltech, he did graduate work at Stanford University receiving an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering. He was then a post-doc at IBM’s research lab in Zurich, Switzerland in the oxide superconductors and novel materials group managed by Nobel Prize winners J. Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Müller. In 1992 he joined the faculty at Penn State in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, where he spent 16 years before joining the faculty at Cornell in 2008. His research interests involve the heteroepitaxial growth and characterization of oxide thin films by reactive molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE), especially utilizing a ‘materials-by-design’ approach to the discovery of materials with properties superior to any known. His group synthesizes these oxide heterostructures using molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE). He has published over 600 papers and 8 patents resulting in an h-index of 87 and over 35,000 citations. He has received various awards including a Humboldt Research Award and the MRS Medal, is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Materials Research Society, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Research Interests

The focus of my group’s research is investigating and perfecting the properties of oxide materials for electronic uses. To do this, we grow oxide thin films on single crystal substrates of closely related substances. The single crystal substrate provides a structural template for the thin films that we grow. The films follow this atomic template and are thus said to be epitaxial (inheriting their crystalline arrangement from the underlying substrate). Our focus on oxides is due to the tremendous promise that these materials hold for electrical applications. Oxides exhibit an unparalleled variety of electronic properties. Insulating, semiconducting, and even superconducting oxides all exist within the set of structurally compatible oxides known as perovskites. This structurally related family also includes oxides that are magnetic, ferroelectric, or even both at the same time. In short, this family of oxides contains the full spectrum of electronic properties. A major challenge, however, is to prepare these materials with sufficient quality and integrate them with adequate control so that these properties can be fully utilized in electronic devices. This is our research goal.

Research Group Members

Teaching Interests

Schlom teaches courses on the properties of electronic materials and the synthesis of thin films. During his time at Cornell he has taught the following courses: MSE 3050/5850 — Electronic, Magnetic, and Dielectric Properties of Materials MSE 3070 — Materials Design Concepts I MSE 5430 — Thin-Film Materials Science MSE 6050 — Electronic Properties of Materials.

Selected Publications

  • H.S. Kum, H. Lee, S. Kim, S. Lindemann, W. Kong, K. Qiao, P. Chen, J. Irwin, J.H. Lee, S. Xie, S. Subramanian, J. Shim, S-H. Bae, C. Choi, L. Ranno, S. Seo, S. Lee, J. Bauer, H. Li, K. Lee, J.A. Robinson, C.A. Ross, D.G. Schlom, M.S. Rzchowski, C.B. Eom, and J. Kim, “Heterogeneous Integration of Single-Crystalline Complex-Oxide Membranes,” Nature 578 (2020) 75–81.
  • N.M. Dawley, E.J. Marksz, A.M. Hagerstrom, G.H. Olsen, M.E. Holtz, V. Goian, C. Kadlec, J. Zhang, X. Lu, J.A. Drisko, R. Uecker, S. Ganschow, C.J. Long, J.C. Booth, S. Kamba, C.J. Fennie, D.A. Muller, N.D. Orloff, and D.G. Schlom, “Targeted Chemical Pressure Yields Tunable Millimetre-Wave Dielectric,” Nature Materials 19 (2020) 176–181.
  • W. Gao, C. Addiego, H. Wang, X. Yan, Y. Hou, D. Ji, C. Heikes, Y. Zhang, L. Li, H. Huyan, T. Blum, T. Aoki, Y. Nie, D.G. Schlom, R. Wu, and X.Q. Pan, “Real-Space Charge-Density Imaging with Sub-Ångström Resolution by Four-Dimensional Electron Microscopy,” Nature 575 (2019) 480–484.
  • S. Das, Y.L. Tang, Z. Hong, M.A.P. Gonçalves, M.R. McCarter, C. Klewe, K.X. Nguyen, F. Gómez-Ortiz, P. Shafer, E. Arenholz, V.A. Stoica, S.-L. Hsu, B. Wang, C. Ophus, J.F. Liu, C.T. Nelson, S. Saremi, B. Prasad, A.B. Mei, D.G. Schlom, J. Íñiguez, P. García-Fernández, D.A. Muller, L.Q. Chen, J. Junquera, L.W. Martin, and R. Ramesh, “Observation of Room-Temperature Polar Skyrmions,” Nature 568 (2019) 368–372.
  • R. Ramesh and D.G. Schlom, “Creating Emergent Phenomena in Oxide Superlattices,” Nature Reviews Materials 4 (2019) 257–268.

Selected Awards and Honors

  • International Organization for Crystal Growth (IOCG) Frank Prize 2019

  • Fellow, American Vacuum Society 2019

  • Humboldt Research Award 2018

  • Inducted into National Academy of Engineering 2017

  • Fellow (Materials Research Society) 2010

  • MRS Medal (Materials Research Society) 2008

  • Fellow (American Physical Society) 2003

Education

  • BS (Engineering and Applied Science), California Institute of Technology, 1984
  • MS (Electrical Engineering), Stanford University, 1989
  • Ph D (Materials Science and Engineering), Stanford University, 1990

Websites