New crystalline materials are being discovered every day, and improved synthesis and measurement techniques allow study of novel physical behaviors that emerge in existing materials when exposed to extreme conditions. Our goal is to investigate materials old and new to learn more about their fundamental properties that may form the basis of novel technologies, in particular in the area of renewable energy applications.

Our goal is to tune fundamentally and technologically relevant properties such as magnetism and multiferroicity by controlling the crystal structure of systems that show strong electron correlations. The structural tuning is done by variations in stoichiometry and by growing the material in thin film form (i.e., epitaxial strain) using pulsed laser deposition. The Beekman Research Group explores the structure- property relationship in strongly correlated oxides to gain a better understanding of how structure and electron correlations govern material’s properties and how robust the physics is against reduction of dimensionality (i.e., miniaturization).

Using increasingly better materials synthesis and measurement techniques the Beekman group is determined to work towards a “materials by design” approach in which materials are fabricated with a specific functionality in mind.