Electrically-driven phase transition in magnetite nanostructures

Abstract

Magnetite (Fe${}_3$O${}_4$), an archetypal transition metal oxide, has been used for thousands of years, from lodestones in primitive compasses[1] to a candidate material for magnetoelectronic devices.[2] In 1939 Verwey[3] found that bulk magnetite undergoes a transition at T${}_V$ $\approx$ 120 K from a high temperature "bad metal" conducting phase to a low-temperature insulating phase. He suggested[4] that high temperature conduction is via the fluctuating and correlated valences of the octahedral iron atoms, and that the transition is the onset of charge ordering upon cooling. The Verwey transition mechanism and the question of charge ordering remain highly controversial.[5-11] Here we show that magnetite nanocrystals and single-crystal thin films exhibit an electrically driven phase transition below the Verwey temperature. The signature of this transition is the onset of sharp conductance switching in high electric fields, hysteretic in voltage. We demonstrate that this transition is not due to local heating, but instead is due to the breakdown of the correlated insulating state when driven out of equilibrium by electrical bias. We anticipate that further studies of this newly observed transition and its low-temperature conducting phase will shed light on how charge ordering and vibrational degrees of freedom determine the ground state of this important compound.

17 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Hysteretic current-voltage characteristics and resistance switching at a rectifying Ti/Pr${}_{0.7}$Ca${}_{0.3}$MnO${}_3$ interface
• Infrared and Raman studies of the Verwey transition in magnetite
• Mechanism of the Verwey transition in magnetite
• Resonant X-ray diffraction studies on the charge ordering in magnetite
• Electronic structure of charge-ordered Fe3O4 from calculated optical, megneto-optical Kerr effect, and O K-edge x-ray absorption spectra

Cited by in corpus (24)

• Strongly Correlated Materials
• Electric-field-driven phase transition in vanadium dioxide
• Size Dependence of Metal-Insulator Transition in Stoichiometric Fe3O4 Nanocrystals
• Electric-field-driven resistive switching in dissipative Hubbard model
• Nanogaps with very large aspect ratios for electrical measurements
• Electrical Breakdown in a V2O3 device at the Insulator to Metal Transition
• The origin of hysteresis in resistive switching in magnetite is Joule heating
• Electrical Control of Magnetization in Charge-ordered Multiferroic LuFe2O4
• Quantum Monte Carlo in the steady-state
• Dielectric Breakdown of a Mott Insulator
• Nonlinear current-voltage behavior and electrically driven phase transition in charge frustrated LuFe2O4
• Electronic transport and dynamics in correlated heterostructures
• Accessing the spectral function of in operando devices by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy
• Verwey transition in single magnetite nanoparticles
• Microscopic Theory of Resistive Switching in Ordered Insulators: Electronic vs. Thermal Mechanism
• Electric Field Control of the Verwey Transition and Induced Magnetoelectric Effect in Magnetite
• Separating electric field and thermal effects across the metal-insulator transition in vanadium oxide nanobeams
• Proliferation of metallic domains caused by inhomogeneous heating near the electrically-driven transition in VO${}_2$ nanobeams
• Interplay of bulk and interface effects in the electric-field driven transition in magnetite
• Magnetoresistance anomaly during the electrical triggering of a metal-insulator transition
• Photoinduced magnetization change in multiferroic YbFe2O4
• Statistical distribution of the electric field driven switching of the Verwey state in Fe3O4
• Nonequilibrium thermal state of a voltage-biased Mott insulator
• Multi-probe detection of domain nucleation across the metal-insulator transition in VO${}_2$