We investigate the interplay of ferroelectricity and quantum electron transport at the nanoscale in the regime of Coulomb blockade. Ferroelectric polarization in this case is no longer the external parameter but should be self-consistently calculated along with electron hopping probabilities leading to new physical transport phenomena studying in this paper. These phenomena appear mostly due to effective screening of a grain electric field by ferroelectric environment rather than due to polarization dependent tunneling probabilities. At small bias voltages polarization can be switched by a single excess electron in the grain. In this case transport properties of SET exhibit the instability (memory effect).PACS numbers: 72.80.Tm,77.84.Lf Systems with ferroelectric (FE) elements attract much of attention due to their interesting fundamental properties at the nanoscale as well as due to their possible applications in microelectronics, especially in nonvolatile memory devices, in emerging technologies of Terahertz-detecting and in building of advanced (nano)capacitors.1-14 In quantum junctions the ferroelectricity influences electron transport: Tunneling through the FE barriers shows giant electro-resistance effect caused by the strong dependence of electron tunneling probability on the FE polarization and external bias orientations.7,15 Here we focus on the inverse processthe influence of electron transport on ferroelectricity. 2,10The naive guess would be that a single electron, small quantum object, can slightly influence the macroscopic effect -ferroelectricity. However, we show that this is not quite true and discuss the interplay of ferroelectricity and quantum electron transport at the nanoscale in the regime of Coulomb blockade. Polarization in this case is no longer the external parameter but should be self-consistently calculated along with electron hopping probabilities leading to new physical transport phenomena studying in this paper. These phenomena appear mostly due to effective screening of a grain electric field by ferroelectric environment rather than due to polarization dependent tunneling probabilities.Ferroelectrics (FE) are characterized by the polarization P whose direction and magnitude can be changed by applying an external electric field E larger than the ferroelectric switching field, E s . The ground ferroelectric state of a bulk sample is usually not uniformly polarized but divided into domains to lower the electrostatic energy, like in ferromagnets. 16At the nanoscale to influence the polarization of (nano)ferroelectric one can apply strong enough bias to nanotips:2 There is a well developed technique of imaging and control of domain structures in ferroelectric thin films by a tip of a scanning probe microscope, see, e.g., Refs. 2,7,10,[17][18][19] Here we show how ferroelectric polarization switching can be produced by placing a single excess electron at the nanograin. Charged metal particle creates a strong enough electric field, E ≈ 1 MV/cm around it. Numerous ferroelectric (nano)...
The fundamental property of most single-electron devices with quasicontinuous quasiparticle spectrum on the island is the periodicity of their transport characteristics in the gate voltage. This property is robust even with respect to placing the ferroelectric insulators in the source and drain tunnel junctions. We show that placing the ferroelectric inside the gate capacitance breaks this periodicity. The current-voltage characteristics of this SET strongly depends on the ferroelectric polarization and shows the giant memory-effect even for negligible ferroelectric hysteresis making this device promising for memory applications.
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