Influence of the electronic structure on tunneling through ferroelectric insulators: Application to BaTiO3 and PbTiO33

Electronic tunneling through ferroelectric insulators is considered to be a key ingredient of future oxide electronics. We investigate the role of the electronic band structure of the decaying electronic states in the band gap by first discussing the expected behavior of tunneling in the effective mass model. We demonstrate that, even for the simple prototype ferroelectric oxides in the perovskite structures PbTiO3 and BaTiO3, the basic assumption of the effective mass model is not appropriate, and that the correct interpretation of tunneling in these materials requires a material-specific description of the evanescent states as provided by the complex band structure.