Synthesis and electrical behavior of VO2 thin films grown on SrRuO3 electrode layers

VO2 thin films were grown on conducting oxide underlayer SrRuO3 buffered SrTiO3 (111) and Si/SiO2 substrates, respectively, using sputtering. X-ray diffraction phi-scans revealed the epitaxial nature of the VO2 films grown on SrRuO3 buffered SrTiO3 and polycrystalline structure for films grown on SrRuO3 buffered Si/SiO2. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy confirms a dominant presence of V4+ in both films and establishes a high-quality growth of single-phase VO2 films. Temperature and electric-field driven metal-insulator-transition in both the in-plane and out-of-plane configurations were investigated. Depending on the configuration, the resistance change across the metal-insulator-transition varies from a factor of 1.57–3. The measured resistance in each state as well as the magnitude of resistance change were similar during temperature and electric-field driven metal-insulator-transition. To shed light on the suppressed metal-insulator-transition characteristics due to the current shunting effect from conducting SrRuO3 bottom electrode, a distributed resistance network model is proposed and benchmarked against reports from the literature. The results demonstrate the growth of high-quality VO2 on conducting SrRuO3 layers and their electrical behavior, which is of particular interest for all-oxide electronic devices utilizing phase transitions such as resistive memory and neuromorphic oscillators.