Abstract
Domain walls in ferroelectric semiconductors show promise as multifunctional two-dimensional elements for next-generation nanotechnology. Electric fields, for example, can control the direct-current resistance and reversibly switch between insulating and conductive domain-wall states, enabling elementary electronic devices such as gates and transistors. To facilitate electrical signal processing and transformation at the domain-wall level, however, an expansion into the realm of alternating-current technology is required. Here, we demonstrate diode-like alternating-to-direct current conversion based on neutral ferroelectric domain walls in ErMnO3. By combining scanning probe and dielectric spectroscopy, we show that the rectification occurs at the tip–wall contact for frequencies at which the walls are effectively pinned. Using density functional theory, we attribute the responsible transport behaviour at the neutral walls to an accumulation of oxygen defects. The practical frequency regime and magnitude of the direct current output are controlled by the bulk conductivity, establishing electrode–wall junctions as versatile atomic-scale diodes.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals
Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription
$29.99 / 30 days
cancel any time
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 print issues and online access
$259.00 per year
only $21.58 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
References
Seidel, J. et al. Conduction at domain walls in oxide multiferroics. Nat. Mater. 8, 229–234 (2009).
Salje, E. K. H. Multiferroic domain boundaries as active memory devices: Trajectories towards domain boundary engineering. ChemPhysChem 11, 940–950 (2010).
Catalan, G., Seidel, J., Ramesh, R. & Scott, J. F. Domain wall nanoelectronics. Rev. Mod. Phys. 84, 119–156 (2012).
Meier, D. Functional domain walls in multiferroics. J. Phys. Cond. Matter 27, 463003 (2015).
Guyonnet, J., Gaponenko, I., Gariglio, S. & Paruch, P. Conduction at domain walls in insulating Pb(Zr0.2Ti0.8)O3 thin films. Adv. Mater. 23, 5377–5382 (2011).
Schröder, M. et al. Conducting domain walls in lithium niobate single crystals. Adv. Funct. Mater. 22, 3936–3944 (2012).
Sluka, T., Tagantsev, A. K., Bednyakov, P. & Setter, N. Free-electron gas at charged domain walls in insulating BaTiO3. Nat. Commun. 4, 1808 (2013).
Oh, Y. S., Luo, X., Huang, F.-T., Wang, Y. & Cheong, S.-W. Experimental demonstration of hybrid improper ferroelectricity and the presence of abundant charged walls in (Ca,Sr)3Ti2O7 crystals. Nat. Mater. 14, 407–413 (2015).
Meier, D. et al. Anisotropic conductance at improper ferroelectric domain walls. Nat. Mater. 11, 284–288 (2012).
Eliseev, E. A., Morozovska, A. N., Svechnikov, G. S., Gopalan, V. & Shur, V. Y. Static conductivity of charged domain walls in uniaxial ferroelectric semiconductors. Phys. Rev. B 83, 235313 (2011).
Sanchez-Santolino, G. et al. Resonant electron tunnelling assisted by charged domain walls in multiferroic tunnel junctions. Nat. Nanotech. 12, 655–662 (2017).
McQuaid, R. G. P., Campbell, M. P., Whatmore, R. W., Kumar, A. & Gregg, J. M. Injection and controlled motion of conducting domain walls in improper ferroelectric Cu–Cl boracite. Nat. Commun. 8, 15105 (2017).
Hassanpour, E. et al. Robustness of magnetic and electric domains against charge carrier doping in multiferroic hexagonal ErMnO3. New J. Phys. 18, 043015 (2016).
Schaab, J. et al. Optimization of electronic domain-wall properties by aliovalent cation substitution. Adv. Electr. Mater. 2, 1500195 (2016).
Rojac, T. et al. Domain-wall conduction in ferroelectric BiFeO3 controlled by accumulation of charged defects. Nat. Mater. 16, 322–327 (2016).
Mundy, J. A. et al. Functional electronic inversion layers at ferroelectric domain walls. Nat. Mater. 16, 622–627 (2017).
Maksymovych, P. et al. Dynamic conductivity of ferroelectric domain walls in BiFeO3. Nano Lett. 11, 1906–1912 (2011).
Maksymovych, P. et al. Tunable metallic conductance in ferroelectric nanodomains. Nano Lett. 12, 209–213 (2012).
Crassous, A., Sluka, T., Tagantsev, A. K. & Setter, N. Polarization charge as a reconfigurable quasi-dopant in ferroelectric thin films. Nat. Nanotech. 10, 614–618 (2015).
Tselev, A. et al. Microwave AC conductivity of domain walls in ferroelectric thin films. Nat. Commun. 7, 11630 (2016).
Wu, X. et al. Low-energy structural dynamics of ferroelectric domain walls in hexagonal rare-earth manganites. Science Adv. 3, e1602371 (2017).
Prosandeev, S., Yang, Y., Paillard, C. & Bellaiche, L. Displacement current in domain walls of bismuth ferrite. npj Comput. Mater. 4, 8 (2018).
Chae, S. C. et al. Direct observation of the proliferation of ferroelectric loop domains and vortex–antivortex pairs. Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 167603 (2012).
Van Aken, B. B., Palstra, T. T. M., Filippetti, A. & Spaldin, N. A. The origin of ferroelectricity in magnetoelectric YMnO3. Nat. Mater. 3, 164–170 (2004).
Campbell, M. P. et al. Hall effect in charged conducting ferroelectric domain walls. Nat. Commun. 7, 13764 (2016).
Wu, W., Horibe, Y., Lee, N., Cheong, S.-W. & Guest, J. R. Conduction of topologically protected charged ferroelectric domain walls. Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 077203 (2012).
Choi, T. et al. Insulating interlocked ferroelectric and structural antiphase domain walls in multiferroic YMnO3. Nat. Mater. 9, 253–258 (2010).
Wu, W. et al. Polarization-modulated rectification at ferroelectric surfaces. Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 217601 (2010).
Du, Y. et al. Domain wall conductivity in oxygen deficient multiferroic YMnO3 single crystals. Appl. Phys. Lett. 99, 252107 (2011).
Jesse, S., Mirman, B. & Kalinin, S. V. Resonance enhancement in piezoresponse force microscopy: Mapping electromechanical activity, contact stiffness, and Q factor. Appl. Phys. Lett. 89, 022906 (2006).
Douglas, A. M., Kumar, A., Whatmore, R. W. & Gregg, J. M. Local conductance: A means to extract polarization and depolarizing fields near domain walls in ferroelectrics. Appl. Phys. Lett. 107, 172905 (2015).
Ruff, E. et al. Conductivity contrast and tunneling charge transport in the vortex-like ferroelectric domain pattern of multiferroic hexagonal YMnO3. Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 036803 (2017).
Jungk, T., Hoffmann, A. & Soergel, E. Impact of the tip radius on the lateral resolution in piezoresponse force microscopy. New J. Phys. 10, 013019 (2008).
Lunkenheimer, P. et al. Colossal dielectric constants in transition-metal oxides. Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Topics 180, 61–89 (2009).
Griffin, S. M. et al. Scaling behavior and beyond equilibrium in the hexagonal manganites. Phys. Rev. X 2, 041022 (2012).
Meier, Q. N. et al. Global formation of topological defects in the multiferroic hexagonal manganites. Phys. Rev. X 7, 041014 (2017).
Holtz, M. E. et al. Topological defects in hexagonal manganites: Inner structure and emergent electrostatics. Nano Lett. 17, 5883–5890 (2017).
Artyukhin, S. et al. Landau theory of topological defects in multiferroic hexagonal manganites. Nat. Mater. 13, 42–49 (2014).
Skjærvø, S. H. et al. Interstitial oxygen as a source of p-type conductivity in hexagonal manganites. Nat. Commun. 7, 13745 (2016).
Kumagai, Y. & Spaldin, N. A. Structural domain walls in polar hexagonal manganites. Nat. Commun. 4, 1540 (2013).
Yan, Z. et al. Growth of high-quality hexagonal ErMnO3 single crystals by the pressurized floating-zone method. J. Cryst. Growth 409, 75–79 (2015).
Kresse, G. & Furthmüller, J. Efficient iterative schemes for ab initio total-energy calculations using a plane-wave basis set. Phys. Rev. B 54, 11169 (1996).
Kresse, G. & Joubert, D. From ultrasoft pseudopotentials to the projector augmented-wave method. Phys. Rev. B 59, 1758–1775 (1999).
Perdew, J. P. et al. Restoring the density-gradient expansion for exchange in solids and surfaces. Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 136406 (2008).
Dudarev, S. L., Botton, G. A., Savrasov, S. Y., Humphreys, C. J. & Sutton, A. P. Electron-energy-loss spectra and the structural stability of nickel oxide: An LSDA + U study. Phys. Rev. B 57, 1505–1509 (1998).
Blöchl, P. E. Projector augmented-wave method. Phys. Rev. B 50, 17953 (1994).
Momma, K. & Izumi, F. VESTA: a three-dimensional visualization system for electronic and structural analysis. J. Appl. Cryst. 41, 653–658 (2008).
Acknowledgements
The authors thank N.A. Spaldin, S.V. Kalinin and E. Soergel for fruitful discussions. D.M., M.F. and J.S. acknowledge funding from the SNF (Proposal No. 200021_149192) and the NTNU Onsager Fellowship Program (D.M.). Z.Y. and E.B. were supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division under Contract No. DE-AC02-05-CH11231 within the Quantum Materials Program no. KC2202. Electron microscopy work was supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering under Award No. DE-SC0002334. This work made use of the electron microscopy facility of the Cornell Center for Materials Research Shared Facilities, which are supported through the NSF MRSEC Program (DMR-1719875). S.K. acknowledges funding from the DFG via the Transregional Collaborative Research Center TRR 80 (Augsburg/Munich/Stuttgart, Germany), and from the BMBF via ENREKON 03EK3015.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
J.S. and X.D. conducted the SPM study under the supervision of D.M. with assistance from M.L. (supervised by M.F.). S.H.S. performed the DFT calculations, supervised by S.M.S. S.K. recorded the macroscopic dielectric spectroscopy data. M.E.H. obtained the STEM data, supervised by D.A.M. Z.Y. and E.B. grew the ErMnO3 crystals and M.L. prepared the series of samples with different conduction properties. J.S., S.K., A.C. and D.M. analysed the experimental data. D.M. initiated and coordinated this project, and wrote the manuscript, supported by J.S., S.K. and S.M.S. All authors discussed the results and contributed to the final version of the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
Supplementary Figures 1–6, Supplementary Table 1
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Schaab, J., Skjærvø, S.H., Krohns, S. et al. Electrical half-wave rectification at ferroelectric domain walls. Nature Nanotech 13, 1028–1034 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-018-0253-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-018-0253-5
This article is cited by
-
Ferroelectric domain walls for nanotechnology
Nature Reviews Materials (2021)
-
Giant thermoelectric power factor in charged ferroelectric domain walls of GeTe with Van Hove singularities
npj Computational Materials (2020)
-
Domain wall-localized phonons in BiFeO3: spectrum and selection rules
npj Computational Materials (2020)
-
Conductivity control via minimally invasive anti-Frenkel defects in a functional oxide
Nature Materials (2020)
-
Application of a long short-term memory for deconvoluting conductance contributions at charged ferroelectric domain walls
npj Computational Materials (2020)