Materials Science and Metallurgy
Professor of Materials Science
I am Professor of Materials Science in Cambridge and Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Materials. I am Visiting Staff Member at Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico. I am a Fellow of Trinity College, the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Materials Research Society, American Physical Society, IOM3, IOP, Women Engineers Society, and the American academy of Arts and Sciences.
Prof. Driscoll and her group’s research interests are in the area of ‘Energy Efficient Oxide Materials for ICT and Energy Devices’. More details can be found on the Driscoll group website:
https://driscoll.msm.cam.ac.uk/
Prof. Driscoll’s group is part of the Device Materials Group (DMG), a group with a >60 year history, founded by the late Prof. Jan Evetts. The DMG has launched the careers of so many successful researchers through sharing of equipment, personnel and know-how. They’ve gone on to flourishing careers in top Universities and Institutions in Cambridge, in the UK and worldwide.
https://www.dmg.msm.cam.ac.uk/
To both create and understand new oxide energy devices, we undertake nanoscale design and tuning of thin film materials. Our aim is to improve the performance of the films as well as overcome their complexities in terms of compositions, defects and interfaces. We also create test device structures down to 10’s nanometre length-scales.
We have world-leading growth equipment, principally:
– pulsed laser deposition with RHEED control of growth and in-situ XPS.
– high temperature oxide sputtering with controlled angle deposition.
– spatial ALD.
We use a very wide range of characterisation tools (materials characterisation and electrical characterisation) within our group and outside the group to learn about the properties of the materials and devices. We collaborate very widely with groups around the world, and also often with group alumni and industry. Collectively, we bring together the wide ranging skills that are essential to solve some of the most complex materials challenges of our time. Our role is to think of the right materials for the desired functional goals, predict how they can be fabricated optimally in thin film device form, fabricate them, and measure them. This is supported by basic understanding of how and why they behave as they do. Our collaborators do many further specialist in-depth measurements and studies. Our work is often licensed by different industries and we then work with them to further develop the devices.
An paper showing the kind of work we do to achieve memristors with high performance (for a wide range of metrics) is shown below for nanoengineered WO3 based memristor films to achieve high endurance (a challenge for filamentary switching devices).
