Logo image
The Observation of Domain‐Wall Current Transients Along with Charge Injection at Elevated Temperatures
Journal article

The Observation of Domain‐Wall Current Transients Along with Charge Injection at Elevated Temperatures

Dongfang Chen, Zongquan Gu, Dong‐Hui Zhao, Zilong Bai and Anquan Jiang
Advanced electronic materials, v 5(4), pp 1800879-n/a
Apr 2019

Abstract

charge injection domain wall conductivity epitaxial BiFeO3 thin films oxygen vacancies
Erasable conductive domain walls (DWs) in insulating ferroelectrics are key components to reconfigurable nanocircuitries, nanosensors, and memories, but the wall currents are found to decay with time, especially at high temperatures. In this study, DW currents are induced upon partial domain switching against the peripheral unswitched bulk domain under the application of in‐plane electric field between two top electrodes patterned on epitaxial BiFeO3 (BFO) thin films. The “on” currents are followed by a drop at higher bias above the coercive voltage, which becomes more significant at elevated temperature from 298 to 408 K. An opposite “on” current is observed in the back sweeping when the above walls are erased to restore the as‐grown, stable domain structure. The phenomenon is explained by a film defect‐related model that free charges are injected and locally trapped at the defect levels to help screen the uncompensated polarizations in the conducting DWs, resulting in the wall current reduction. Once the walls are erased at opposite coercive voltages, the trapped free charges at the conducting DWs are expelled to form a discharge current. This finding provides the fundamental physics of the wall conduction in correlation with the film defects and reversible charge injection. Epitaxial BiFeO3 thin films with periodic stripe domains are prepared to study the effect of charge injection on the domain wall current. The wall currents are dropped because the uncompensated polarization charges at the artificially created domain walls are screened by the oxygen vacancy–mediated charge capture, which is accelerated with increasing voltage and temperature.

Metrics

8 Record Views
8 citations in Scopus

Details

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

This publication has contributed to the advancement of the following goals:

#7 Affordable and Clean Energy

InCites Highlights

Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:

Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
International collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Materials Science, Multidisciplinary
Nanoscience & Nanotechnology
Physics, Applied
Logo image