Dieter Weber

Part of my current work as a product manager is to make sure our software caters to the needs of various user groups. That means I observe what people do and how they do it in order to figure out what could be improved. Doing that I noticed a fundamental difference between users and software developers: Users are not used to modify software! Read more on how to improve the situation.

Many scientists swear by LaTeX, while others prefer Word or LibreOffice. I personally use LaTeX for any serious scientific writing. But for which reasons do people use LaTeX?

For a long time it has been difficult to include special formatting like mathematical or chemical formulae, footnotes, figures with numbers, and reference lists in HTML documents. Alex and Gundula Clausen implemented these features for this blog in a way similar to LaTeX. Scientific articles can therefore be presented as blog articles and not only provided as PDF downloads. This is in my opinion the future of scientific publishing.

Variable resistors were constructed from epitaxial $\ce{SrRuO3}$ (SRO), $\ce{La_{0.67}Sr_{0.33}MnO3}$ (LSMO) and $\ce{SrTiO3}$ layers with perovskite crystal structure. Each layer was patterned separately by lithographic methods. Optimized wet chemical etchants and several polishing steps in organic solvents allowed good epitaxy of subsequent layers, comparable to epitaxy on pristine substrates. Periodate as the oxidizing agent for SRO and iodide with ascorbic acid as the reducing agents for LSMO were used to attack these chemically resistant oxides. The final devices changed their conductance in a similar manner to previously described variable resistors that were defined with shadow masks.

This article was originally published in Thin Solid Films (2013)