6 SCIENTIFIC HIGHLIGHT OF THE MONTH: Electronic Phenomena at Complex Oxide Interfaces: Insights from First Principles Electronic Phenomena at Complex Oxide Interfaces: Insights from First Principles

Oxide interfaces have attracted considerable attention in recent years due to the emerg-ing novel behavior which does not exist in the corresponding bulk parent compounds. This opens possibilities for future applications in oxide based electronics and spintronics devices. Among the different materials combinations, heterostructures containing the two simple band insulators LaAlO3 and SrTiO3 have advanced to a model system exhibiting unanticipated properties ranging from conductivity, to magnetism, even to superconductivity. Electronic structure calculations have contributed significantly towards understanding these phenom-ena and we review here the progress achieved in the past years also showing some future directions and perspectives. A central issue in understanding the novel behavior in these oxide heterostructures is to discover the way (or ways) that these heterostructures deal with the polar discontinuity at the interface. Despite analogies to polar semiconductor interfaces, transition metal oxides offer much richer possibilities to compensate the valence mismatch, including e.g. an electronic reconstruction. Moreover, electronic correlations can lead to ad-ditional complex behavior like charge disproportionation and order, magnetism, and orbita