4.8 Article

Anisotropic conductance at improper ferroelectric domain walls

Journal

NATURE MATERIALS
Volume 11, Issue 4, Pages 284-288

Publisher

NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/NMAT3249

Keywords

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Funding

  1. Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences Division of the US Department of Energy [DE-AC02-05CH1123]
  2. Alexander von Humboldt Foundation
  3. Japan Society for the Promotion of Science
  4. ETH Zurich
  5. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [SFB608]
  6. National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center [E3S]

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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(1-9). 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 manganites(10). 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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