How epitaxial strain influences the electronic behavior and charge distribution in thin films continues to be an important question in oxide research. When a film is forced to match a substrate with a mismatched lattice, the resulting distortion alters bond lengths and orbital energies, creating new electronic states that are absent in the unstrained bulk.

One project I did during my PhD at MPI focused directly on this strain-driven behavior. Working in collaboration with Prof. H. Takagi's group, I used STEM-EELS to probe oxide thin films at the atomic scale, studying how epitaxial strain influences their local electronic structure.

In our 2023 PNAS paper, we showed that epitaxial strain can stablize Verway-type charge ordering in spinel oxide LiV2O4. This finding illustrates how thin-film epitaxy can tune geometrical frustration to uncover correlated quantum phases absent in the bulk.