SKM 2021 – scientific programme

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HL: Fachverband Halbleiterphysik

HL 19: Poster Session IV

HL 19.6: Poster

Thursday, September 30, 2021, 13:30–16:30, P

Electric-field-driven evolution of anti-Frenkel defects in ErMnO3 — •Jiali He¹, Ursula Ludacka¹, Donald Evans¹, Theodor Holstad¹, Erik Roede¹, Kasper Hunnestad¹, Konstantin Shapovalov², Zewu Yan^3,4, Edith Bourret⁴, Antonius Van Helvoort¹, and Dennis Meier¹ — ¹Norwegian University of Science and Technology(NTNU), Trondheim, Norway. — ²Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona, Bellaterra, Spain — ³ETH Zurich, Zürich, Switzerland. — ⁴Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA.

The electronic properties of complex oxides can readily be tuned via oxygen defects, offering intriguing opportunities for precisely controlling the conductivity of the materials. Recently, anti-Frenkel defects moved into focus for minimally invasive property engineering. Anti-Frenkel defects are charge-neutral interstitial-vacancy pairs, and their injection makes it possible to adjust the transport behavior in oxides without causing long-range ionic migration or changes in stoichiometry. Here, we present a detailed analysis of the electric-field-driven formation and response of anti-Frenkel defects in hexagonal ErMnO3. The defects are generated via an electrically biased nano-sized probe tip and imaged by cAFM and SEM. We investigate the spatio-temporal evolution of the written defects for different drive voltages, complemented by numerical simulations, which reveal a non-trivial evolution, allowing to separate the initially paired vacancies and interstitials. The results provide new insight into the local electronic properties of ErMnO3 and the nanoscale defect physics of functional oxides in general.