Exploration and Optimization of the Metal Insulator Transition in Vanadium Dioxide Thin Films

摘要

Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is an archetypal strongly correlated oxide and could offer many opportunities for new paradigms of information processing, memory and sensing technology based on a phase transition that could be induced by many means. In this project, we developed a better experimental understanding of the metal-insulator transition in VO2 and explored the various ways to control the transition temperature and hysteresis. Beyond attempts to understand the strong correlation phenomena in VO2, we hope to demonstrate a phase transition switch based on the electrically induced metal-insulator transition and compare the performance to the state-of-art Si CMOS. We have examined the influence of intrinsic and extrinsic factors and are still characterizing their impact on the phase transition of VO2. Nonetheless, we have observed a number of new phenomena during this seed project that will be summarized here. These new phenomena are not only fascinating by themselves but also promise new opportunities in device applications.