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Anisotropic conductance at improper ferroelectric domain walls

Nature Materials volume 11, pages 284–288 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

Transition metal oxides hold great potential for the development of new device paradigms because of the field-tunable functionalities driven by their strong electronic correlations, combined with their earth abundance and environmental friendliness. Recently, the interfaces between transition-metal oxides have revealed striking phenomena, such as insulator–metal transitions, magnetism, magnetoresistance and superconductivity1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. Such oxide interfaces are usually produced by sophisticated layer-by-layer growth techniques, which can yield high-quality, epitaxial interfaces with almost monolayer control of atomic positions. The resulting interfaces, however, are fixed in space by the arrangement of the atoms. Here we demonstrate a route to overcoming this geometric limitation. We show that the electrical conductance at the interfacial ferroelectric domain walls in hexagonal ErMnO3 is a continuous function of the domain wall orientation, with a range of an order of magnitude. We explain the observed behaviour using first-principles density functional and phenomenological theories, and relate it to the unexpected stability of head-to-head and tail-to-tail domain walls in ErMnO3 and related hexagonal manganites10. As the domain wall orientation in ferroelectrics is tunable using modest external electric fields, our finding opens a degree of freedom that is not accessible to spatially fixed interfaces.

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Figure 1: Bias-dependent domain and domain wall conductance.
Figure 2: Anisotropic electrical conductance of ferroelectric domain walls.
Figure 3: Angular dependence of the local domain wall conductance.
Figure 4: Electronic structure of charged and uncharged ferroelectric domain walls.

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Acknowledgements

The work at Berkeley is supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences Division of the US Department of Energy under contract No DE-AC02-05CH1123. The authors acknowledge the following support: by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (D.M., J.S.), by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellowships for Research Abroad (Y.K.), by the ETH Zürich (N.A.S., M.F.), and by the SFB608 of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (M.F.). D.M. is also supported by the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center (E3S).

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Author notes

  1. D. Meier and J. Seidel: These authors contributed equally to this work

  2. meier@berkeley.edu

  3. jseidel@berkeley.edu

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    D. Meier, J. Seidel & R. Ramesh

  2. Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    D. Meier & R. Ramesh

  3. Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California 94720, USA

    J. Seidel & R. Ramesh

  4. School of Materials Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales 2052, Australia

    J. Seidel

  5. European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, 6 Rue Jules Horowitz, 38043 Grenoble, France

    A. Cano

  6. Materials Research Laboratory, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, USA

    K. Delaney

  7. Department of Materials, ETH Zürich, Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse, 8093 Zürich, Switzerland

    Y. Kumagai, N. A. Spaldin & M. Fiebig

  8. Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, University of Groningen, Nijenborgh 4, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands

    M. Mostovoy

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Contributions

D.M. and J.S. initiated this work and conducted the experiments. A.C. and M.M. worked on the phenomenological analysis. K.D., Y.K., and N.A.S. performed the band structure calculations. R.R. and M.F. supervised the research project, and all authors discussed the results.

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Correspondence to D. Meier or J. Seidel.

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Meier, D., Seidel, J., Cano, A. et al. Anisotropic conductance at improper ferroelectric domain walls. Nature Mater 11, 284–288 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3249

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