Journal
NATURE
Volume 487, Issue 7408, Pages 459-462Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/nature11296
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Funding
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSAP) through 'Funding Program for World-Leading Innovative R&D on Science and Technology (FIRST Program)'
- RIKEN through the Incentive Research Grant
- [22760016]
- [21224009]
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [23684031, 21224009] Funding Source: KAKEN
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In the classic transistor, the number of electric charge carriers-and thus the electrical conductivity-is precisely controlled by external voltage, providing electrical switching capability. This simple but powerful feature is essential for information processing technology, and also provides a platform for fundamental physics research(1-16). As the number of charges essentially determines the electronic phase of a condensed-matter system, transistor operation enables reversible and isothermal changes in the system's state, as successfully demonstrated in electric-field-induced ferromagnetism(2-4) and superconductivity(5-10). However, this effect of the electric field is limited to a channel thickness of nanometres or less, owing to the presence of Thomas-Fermi screening. Here we show that this conventional picture does not apply to a class of materials characterized by inherent collective interactions between electrons and the crystal lattice. We prepared metal-insulator-semiconductor field-effect transistors based on vanadium dioxide-a strongly correlated-material with a thermally driven, first-order metal-insulator transition well above room temperature(17-23)-and found that electrostatic charging at a surface drives all the previously localized charge carriers in the bulk material into motion, leading to the emergence of a three-dimensional metallic ground state. This non-local switching of the electronic state is achieved by applying a voltage of only about one volt. In a voltage-sweep measurement, the first-order nature of the metal-insulator transition provides a non-volatilememory effect, which is operable at room temperature. Our results demonstrate a conceptually new field-effect device, extending the concept of electric-field control to macroscopic phase control.
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