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Impulse voltage control of continuously tunable bipolar resistive switching in Pt/Bi0.9Eu0.1FeO3/Nb-doped SrTiO3 heterostructures

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Abstract

Epitaxial Bi0.9Eu0.1FeO3 (BEFO) thin films are deposited on Nb-doped SrTiO3 (NSTO) substrates by pulsed laser deposition to fabricate the Pt/BEFO/NSTO (001) heterostructures. These heterostructures possess bipolar resistive switching, where the resistances versus writing voltage exhibits a distinct hysteresis loop and a memristive behavior with good retention and anti-fatigue characteristics. The local resistive switching is confirmed by the conductive atomic force microscopy (C-AFM), suggesting the possibility to scale down the memory cell size. The observed memristive behavior could be attributed to the ferroelectric polarization effect, which modulates the height of potential barrier and width of depletion region at the BEFO/NSTO interface. The continuously tunable resistive switching behavior could be useful to achieve non-volatile, high-density, multilevel random access memory with low energy consumption.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 51372174, 51132001, 11364018, J1210061 and 11504101), the Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (Grant No.: 2014CFB610), and the Excellent Young Innovation Team Project of Hubei Province (Grant No. T201429).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Advanced Materials, and School of Physics and Electronic Science, Hubei Normal University, Huangshi, 435002, China

    Maocai Wei, Meifeng Liu & Xiuzhang Wang

  2. School of Physics and Technology, and Key Laboratory of Artificial Micro/Nano Structures of the Ministry of Education, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Meiya Li, Yongdan Zhu, Meng Zhao, Feng Zhang & Shuai Xie

  3. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, 02115, USA

    Zhongqiang Hu

  4. Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, China

    Jun-Ming Liu

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  1. Maocai Wei
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Correspondence to Meiya Li.

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Wei, M., Liu, M., Wang, X. et al. Impulse voltage control of continuously tunable bipolar resistive switching in Pt/Bi0.9Eu0.1FeO3/Nb-doped SrTiO3 heterostructures. Appl. Phys. A 123, 198 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-017-0842-4

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