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Effect of cation and anion defects on the resistive switching polarity of ZnO x thin films

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Abstract

In this paper, we achieve the resistive switching (RS) polarity from unipolar to bipolar in a simple Al/ZnO x /Al structure by moderating the oxygen content in the ZnO sputtering process. In a pure Ar sputtering, Al/ZnO x /Al shows unipolar behavior, as oxygen partial pressure increases, the RS polarity changes to bipolar, and the switch current decreases by about five orders of magnitude. The current transport properties of unipolar device show ohmic behavior under both high resistance (HRS) and low resistance states (LRS), but the bipolar device shows Schottky barrier modulated current transport properties. We study the defect types in the unipolar and bipolar devices through photoluminescence (PL) spectra. The PL results show that the interstitial zinc (Zni) and interstitial oxygen (Oi) are dominant in unipolar and bipolar devices, respectively. We attribute this phenomenon to Zni and Oi playing important role in unipolar (URS) and bipolar resistive switching (BRS), respectively.

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Abbreviations

RS:

Resistive switching

URS:

Unipolar resistive switching

BRS:

Bipolar resistive switching

HRS:

High resistance state

LRS:

Low resistance state

Zni :

Interstitial zinc

Oi :

Interstitial oxygen

VO :

Oxygen vacancy

V Zn :

Zn vacancy

XRD:

X-ray diffraction

SEM:

Scanning electron microscopy

PL:

Photoluminescence

SCLC:

Space charge limited conduction

SCCM:

Standard-state cubic centimeter per minute

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61076042 and 60607006); the Special Project on Development of National Key Scientific Instruments and Equipment of China (Grant No. 2011YQ16000205), and National Key Technology RD Program of China (Grant No. 2009BAH49B01).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 430074, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China

    Xinghui Wu, Zhimou Xu, Binbing Liu, Tangyou Sun, Wenning Zhao, Sisi Liu, Zhichao Ma, Fei Zhao, Shuangbao Wang & Xueming Zhang

  2. School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 430074, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China

    Shiyuan Liu

  3. College of Sciences, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, 430081, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China

    Jing Peng

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  1. Xinghui Wu
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Correspondence to Zhimou Xu.

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Wu, X., Xu, Z., Liu, B. et al. Effect of cation and anion defects on the resistive switching polarity of ZnO x thin films. Appl. Phys. A 114, 847–852 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00339-013-7704-5

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