Anisotropic conductance at improper ferroelectric domain walls

Publication Type
Journal Article
Authors
DOI
10.1038/nmat3249
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 superconductivity. 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 manganites. 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. © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
Notes
cited By 251
Journal
Nature Materials
Volume
11
Year of Publication
2012
Number
4
Pagination
284-288
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
ISSN Number
14761122
Keywords
Research Areas
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