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Vacancy breathing by grain boundaries—a mechanism of memristive switching in polycrystalline oxides

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Abstract

It is widely believed that switching to the conductive state in memristive materials is triggered by the external field that drives defect dynamics. In polycrystalline materials, grain boundaries are further believed to cause switching by enabling faster defect motion. Here, we report a firstprinciple study of oxygen vacancy dynamics at a grain boundary (GB) in polycrystalline ZnO and show that switching to the conductive state is triggered by a recombination-enhanced motion of vacancies perpendicular to the GB. We call this mechanism the “breathing” trigger of memristive switching.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by National Science Foundationgrant DMR-1207241 and the McMinn Endowment at Vanderbilt University. Computational support was provided by the NSF XSEDE under Grant # DMR130072.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, 37235, USA

    Xiao Shen, Yevgeniy S. Puzyrev & Sokrates T. Pantelides

  2. Materials Science and Technology Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 37831, USA

    Sokrates T. Pantelides

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, 37235, USA

    Sokrates T. Pantelides

Authors
  1. Xiao Shen
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  2. Yevgeniy S. Puzyrev
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  3. Sokrates T. Pantelides
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Correspondence to Xiao Shen.

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Shen, X., Puzyrev, Y.S. & Pantelides, S.T. Vacancy breathing by grain boundaries—a mechanism of memristive switching in polycrystalline oxides. MRS Communications 3, 167–170 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1557/mrc.2013.32

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1557/mrc.2013.32

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