Nonvolatile Control of Metal-Insulator Transition in VO by Ferroelectric Gating.

Controlling phase transitions in correlated materials yields emergent functional properties, providing new aspects to future electronics and a fundamental understanding of condensed matter systems. With vanadium dioxide (VO ), a representative correlated material, an approach to control a metal-insulator transition (MIT) behavior is developed by employing a heteroepitaxial structure with a ferroelectric BiFeO (BFO) layer to modulate the interaction of correlated electrons. Owing to the defect-alleviated interfaces, the enhanced coupling between the correlated electrons and ferroelectric polarization is successfully demonstrated by showing a nonvolatile control of MIT of VO at room temperature.