Nature Nanotechnology
Nature Nanotechnology
5 years ago

Resonant electron tunnelling assisted by charged domain walls in multiferroic tunnel junctions

Resonant electron tunnelling assisted by charged domain walls in multiferroic tunnel junctions
Carlos Leon, Mar Garcia-Hernandez, Carmen Munuera, Mariona Cabero, Juan I. Beltran, Javier Tornos, Maria Carmen Muñoz, David Hernandez-Martin, Zouhair Sefrioui, Jesus Ricote, Maria Varela, Federico Mompean, Ana Perez-Muñoz, Jacobo Santamaria, Steve J. Pennycook, Gabriel Sanchez-Santolino
The peculiar features of domain walls observed in ferroelectrics make them promising active elements for next-generation non-volatile memories, logic gates and energy-harvesting devices. Although extensive research activity has been devoted recently to making full use of this technological potential, concrete realizations of working nanodevices exploiting these functional properties are yet to be demonstrated. Here, we fabricate a multiferroic tunnel junction based on ferromagnetic La0.7Sr0.3MnO3 electrodes separated by an ultrathin ferroelectric BaTiO3 tunnel barrier, where a head-to-head domain wall is constrained. An electron gas stabilized by oxygen vacancies is confined within the domain wall, displaying discrete quantum-well energy levels. These states assist resonant electron tunnelling processes across the barrier, leading to strong quantum oscillations of the electrical conductance.

Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2017.51

DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2017.51

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.