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Anisotropic conductance at improper ferroelectric domain walls

Publication Type

Journal Article

Authors

Meier, D, J Seidel, A Cano, K Delaney, Y Kumagai, M Mostovoy, N.A Spaldin, Ramamoorthy Ramesh, M Fiebig

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.

Journal

Nature Materials

Volume

Year of Publication

2012

ISSN

14761122

Notes

cited By 251

Research Areas

Ramesh Lab