The use of renewable energies by photovoltaics, thermoelectrics or electrochemical energy storage is a success story. However, the efficiencies of current devices are well below the theoretically possible limits. There is still a lot of room for new approaches based on new materials and new mechanisms.

Multifunctional oxides and interfaces that exhibit correlated dynamics of excitations are of particular interest. In such systems, the well-established models based on the population of rigid band states and the approximation of independent excitations fail.

Fundamental understanding of the structure-property relationships of such systems is challenging but offer a huge potential for future new, highly efficient and clean energy technologies. Our research group focuses on correlated oxide materials that exhibit new types of phases and correlated excitations.

To investigate these systems down to atomic scale we prepare thin film systems by high quality epitaxy and characterize them using advanced materials science methods. We study the correlated dynamics in non-equilibrium by means of in-situ characterization techniques such as high resolution electron microscopy and optical and photovoltaic setups.