Probing nanocrystalline grain dynamics in nanodevices

Abstract

Dynamical structural defects exist naturally in a wide variety of solids. They fluctuate temporally, and hence can deteriorate the performance of many electronic devices. Thus far, the entities of such dynamic objects have been identified to be individual atoms. On the other hand, it is a long-standing question whether a nanocrystalline grain constituted of a large number of atoms can switch, as a whole, reversibly like a dynamical atomic defect (i.e., a two-level system). This is an emergent issue considering the current development of nanodevices with ultralow electrical noise, qubits with long quantum coherence time, and nanoelectromechanical system (NEMS) sensors with ultrahigh resolution. Here we demonstrate experimental observations of dynamic nanocrystalline grains which repeatedly switch between two or more metastable coordinate states. We study temporal resistance fluctuations in thin ruthenium dioxide (RuO2) metal nanowires and extract microscopic parameters including relaxation time scales, mobile grain sizes, and the bonding strengths of nanograin boundaries. Such material parameters are not obtainable by other experimental approaches. When combined with previous in-situ high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM), our electrical method can be used to infer rich information about the structural dynamics of a wide variety of nanodevices and new 2D materials.

arXiv commentmain text (28 pages) + supplementary material (4 pages)

References in corpus (12)

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Probing individual tunneling fluctuators with coherently controlled tunneling systems
• Oxygen vacancy-driven orbital multichannel Kondo effect in Dirac nodal line metals IrO2 and RuO2
• Bistable Transport Properties of a Quasi-One-Dimensional Wigner Solid on Liquid Helium under Continuous Driving
• Electronic conduction and superconducting properties of CoSi${}_2$ films on silicon--an unconventional superconductor with technological potential
• Changes in electric-field noise due to thermal transformation of a surface ion trap
• Activation energy distribution of dynamical structural defects in RuO${}_2$ films
• 1/ f noise and two-level systems in MBE-grown Al thin films
• Probing Thermally Activated Atomic and Nanocrystalline Defect Motion through Noise Processes in RuO${}_2$ Nanowires