Polarization-switching pathway determined electrical transport behaviors in rhombohedral BiFeO thin films.

Nanoscale

State Key Laboratory of New Ceramics and Fine Processing, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, People's Republic of China.

Published: November 2021

We investigated the polarization-switching pathway-dependent electrical transport behaviors in rhombohedral-phase BiFeO thin films with point contact geometry. By combining conducting-atomic force microscopy and piezoelectric force microscopy, we simultaneously obtained current-voltage curves and the corresponding domain patterns before and after the polarization switching. The results indicate that for the (001)-oriented film, the abrupt current (due to polarization reversing) increases with the enhanced switching voltage for 109° and 180° switching events. More importantly, the abrupt current can be further improved in (110)- and (111)-oriented thin films, which benefits from the stronger modulation of the interfacial Schottky barrier by the enhanced out-of-plane polarization magnitude. The current on-off ratio obtained in a ∼20 nm thick (111)-oriented BiFeO thin film at a readout voltage of ∼3 V exceeds (∼6 × 10)%, which is close to the result from a previous report on ultrathin tetragonal BiFeO thin films.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/d1nr03993hDOI Listing

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