Tunneling electroresistance effect in ultrathin BiFeO3-based ferroelectric tunneling junctions

Tunneling electroresistance (TER) effect has been observed in high quality ultrathin BiFeO3 thin films. The growth quality of the ultrathin BiFeO3 films was confirmed using the synchrotron high resolution X-ray diffraction techniques as well as high-resolution transmission electron microscopy. Ferroelectric-based resistive switching behavior is observed down to 2 u.c. of BiFeO3 ultrathin film, which is way below the critical thickness of BiFeO3 thin films exhibiting ferroelectricity reported in the previous research works. Upon fitting mathematically using the direct tunneling model, it could be seen that there is an increase in the change in the average potential barrier height when the barrier thickness increases from 2 u.c. to 10 u.c., which also results in an increase in the TER ratio by one order of magnitude. These results are promising and pave the way for developing ultrathin BiFeO3 films to be adopted in the non-volatile memory applications.