Anisotropic conductance at improper ferroelectric domain walls

Abstract

Oxide materials show a versatile range of phenomena that in many cases can be controlled by growing thin films of oxides next to each other. The observation now that electrical conductance of domain walls in a ferroelectric can be tuned simply through the domain-wall orientation offers a flexible way of controlling functionality in complex oxides. Transition metal oxides hold great potential for the development of new device paradigms because of the field-tunable functionalities driven by their strong electronic correlations, combined with their earth abundance and environmental friendliness. Recently, the interfaces between transition-metal oxides have revealed striking phenomena, such as insulator–metal transitions, magnetism, magnetoresistance and superconductivity1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. Such oxide interfaces are usually produced by sophisticated layer-by-layer growth techniques, which can yield high-quality, epitaxial interfaces with almost monolayer control of atomic positions. The resulting interfaces, however, are fixed in space by the arrangement of the atoms. Here we demonstrate a route to overcoming this geometric limitation. We show that the electrical conductance at the interfacial ferroelectric domain walls in hexagonal ErMnO3 is a continuous function of the domain wall orientation, with a range of an order of magnitude. We explain the observed behaviour using first-principles density functional and phenomenological theories, and relate it to the unexpected stability of head-to-head and tail-to-tail domain walls in ErMnO3 and related hexagonal manganites10. As the domain wall orientation in ferroelectrics is tunable using modest external electric fields, our finding opens a degree of freedom that is not accessible to spatially fixed interfaces.