Giant Electroresistance

There are many devices that are of fundamental interest. The most latest and famous may be the one invented by Fert et al., which displays giant magnetoresistance. In the past few years, there have appeared a flurry of work exploiting ferroelectrics as the barrier layer. I have mentioned quite a number of them in this blog. Here comes a new one. It is made up by sandwiching a BTO layer with two LSMO at different dopings. All these efforts are clearly directed to manipulate the interweaving properties of spin, charge and orbital degrees.

A giant tunneling electroresistance effect may be achieved in a ferroelectric tunnel junction by exploiting the magnetoelectric effect at the interface between the ferroelectric barrier and a magnetic La1 xSrxMnO3 electrode. Using first-principles density-functional theory we demonstrate that a few magnetic monolayers of La1 xSrxMnO3 near the interface act, in response to ferroelectric polarization
reversal, as an atomic-scale spin valve by filtering spin-dependent current. This produces more than an order of magnitude change in conductance, and thus constitutes a giant resistive switching effect. [PRL 106, 157203 (2011)]