Evidence for defect-mediated tunneling in hexagonal boron nitride-based junctions

Abstract

We investigate tunneling in metal-insulator-metal junctions employing few atomic layers of hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) as the insulating barrier. While the low-bias tunnel resistance increases nearly exponentially with barrier thickness, subtle features are seen in the current-voltage curves, indicating marked influence of the intrinsic defects present in the hBN insulator on the tunneling transport. In particular, single electron charging events are observed, which are more evident in thicker-barrier devices where direct tunneling is substantially low. Furthermore, we find that annealing the devices modifies the defect states and hence the tunneling signatures.

5 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Van der Waals heterostructures
• Boron nitride substrates for high-quality graphene electronics
• Atomically thin boron nitride: a tunnelling barrier for graphene devices
• Resonant tunnelling and negative differential conductance in graphene transistors
• Twist-controlled resonant tunnelling in graphene-boron nitride-graphene heterostructures
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• Gate-Tunable Resonant Tunneling in Double Bilayer Graphene Heterostructures
• Tunneling Between Two-Dimensional Electron Gases in a Strong Magnetic Field

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