No Arabic abstract
Resonant tunnelling is a quantum mechanical process that has long been attracting both scientific and technological attention owing to its intriguing underlying physics and unique applications for high-speed electronics. The materials system exhibiting resonant tunnelling, however, has been largely limited to the conventional semiconductors, partially due to their excellent crystalline quality. Here we show that a deliberately designed transition metal oxide superlattice exhibits a resonant tunnelling behaviour with a clear negative differential resistance. The tunnelling occurred through an atomically thin, lanthanum {delta}-doped SrTiO3 layer, and the negative differential resistance was realized on top of the bipolar resistance switching typically observed for perovskite oxide junctions. This combined process resulted in an extremely large resistance ratio (~10^5) between the high and low-resistance states. The unprecedentedly large control found in atomically thin {delta}-doped oxide superlattices can open a door to novel oxide-based high-frequency logic devices.
We report on resonant tunneling magnetoresistance via localized states through a ZnSe semiconducting barrier which can reverse the sign of the effective spin polarization of tunneling electrons. Experiments performed on Fe/ZnSe/Fe planar junctions have shown that positive, negative or even its sign-reversible magnetoresistance can be obtained, depending on the bias voltage, the energy of localized states in the ZnSe barrier and spatial symmetry. The averaging of conduction over all localized states in a junction under resonant condition is strongly detrimental to the magnetoresistance.
We use scanning tunneling microscopy to study the lithium purple bronze (Li$_{0.9}$Mo$_{6}$O$_{17}$) at room temperature. Our measurements allow us to identify the single-crystal cleave plane and show that it is possible to obtain clean cleaved surfaces reflecting the crystal structure without the complications of nanoscale surface disorder. In addition to the crystal lattice, we observe a coexisting discommensurate superlattice with wavevectors q = 0.5a* $pm$ 0.25b*. We propose that the origin of the superstructure is a surface reconstruction which is driven by cleaving along a crystal plane which contains in-plane MoO$_{4}$ tetrahedra connected to out-of-plane MoO$_{6}$ octahedra through corner-sharing oxygens. When combined with spectroscopic measurements, our studies show a promising avenue through which to study the complex physics within Li$_{0.9}$Mo$_{6}$O$_{17}$.
N-polar GaN/AlN resonant tunneling diodes are realized on single-crystal N-polar GaN bulk substrate by plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy growth. The room-temperature current-voltage characteristics reveal a negative differential conductance (NDC) region with a peak tunneling current of 6.8$pm$ 0.8 kA/cm$^2$ at a forward bias of ~8 V. Under reverse bias, the polarization-induced threshold voltage is measured at ~$-$4 V. These resonant and threshold voltages are well explained with the polarization field which is opposite to that of the metal-polar counterpart, confirming the N-polarity of the RTDs. When the device is biased in the NDC-region, electronic oscillations are generated in the external circuit, attesting to the robustness of the resonant tunneling phenomenon. In contrast to metal-polar RTDs, N-polar structures have the emitter on the top of the resonant tunneling cavity. As a consequence, this device architecture opens up the possibility of seamlessly interfacing$-$via resonant tunneling injection$-$a wide range of exotic materials with III-nitride semiconductors, providing a route to explore new device physics.
A model of sequential resonant tunneling transport between two-dimensional subbands that takes into account explicitly elastic scattering is investigated. It is compared to transport measurements performed on quantum cascade lasers where resonant tunneling processes are known to be dominating. Excellent agreement is found between experiment and theory over a large range of current, temperature and device structures.
The ferroelectric (FE) control of electronic transport is one of the emerging technologies in oxide heterostructures. Many previous studies in FE tunnel junctions (FTJs) exploited solely the differences in the electrostatic potential across the FTJs that are induced by changes in the FE polarization direction. Here, we show that in practice the junction current ratios between the two polarization states can be further enhanced by the electrostatic modification in the correlated electron oxide electrodes, and that FTJs with nanometer thin layers can effectively produce a considerably large electroresistance ratio at room temperature. To understand these surprising results, we employed an additional control parameter, which is related to the crossing of electronic and magnetic phase boundaries of the correlated electron oxide. The FE-induced phase modulation at the heterointerface ultimately results in an enhanced electroresistance effect. Our study highlights that the strong coupling between degrees of freedom across heterointerfaces could yield versatile and novel applications in oxide electronics.