A domain wall‐enabled memristor is created, in thin film lithium niobate capacitors, which shows up to twelve orders of magnitude variation in resistance. Such dramatic changes are caused by the injection of strongly inclined conducting ferroelectric domain walls, which provide conduits for current flow between electrodes. Varying the magnitude of the applied electric‐field pulse, used to induce switching, alters the extent to which polarization reversal occurs; this systematically changes the density of the injected conducting domain walls in the ferroelectric layer and hence the resistivity of the capacitor structure as a whole. Hundreds of distinct conductance states can be produced, with current maxima achieved around the coercive voltage, where domain wall density is greatest, and minima associated with the almost fully switched ferroelectric (few domain walls). Significantly, this “domain wall memristor” demonstrates a plasticity effect: when a succession of voltage pulses of constant magnitude is applied, the resistance changes. Resistance plasticity opens the way for the domain wall memristor to be considered for artificial synapse applications in neuromorphic circuits.

Domain wall nanoelectronics is a rapidly evolving field, which explores the diverse electronic properties of the ferroelectric domain walls for application in lowdimensional electronic systems. One of the most prominent features of the ferroelectric

Enhanced conductivity at specific domain walls in ferroelectrics is now an established phenomenon. Surprisingly, however, little is known about the most fundamental aspects of conduction. Carrier types, densities and mobilities have not been determined and transport mechanisms are still a matter of guesswork. Here we demonstrate that intermittent-contact atomic force microscopy (AFM) can detect the Hall effect in conducting domain walls. Studying YbMnO3 single crystals, we have confirmed that p-type conduction occurs in tail-to-tail charged domain walls. By calibration of the AFM signal, an upper estimate of ∼1 × 1016 cm−3 is calculated for the mobile carrier density in the wall, around four orders of magnitude below that required for complete screening of the polar discontinuity. A carrier mobility of∼50 cm2V−1s−1 is calculated, about an order of magnitude below equivalent carrier mobilities in p-type silicon, but sufficiently high to preclude carrier-lattice coupling associated with small polarons.

Application of conducting ferroelectric domain walls (DW) as functional elements may facilitate development of conceptually new resistive switching devices. In a conventional approach, several orders of magnitude change in resistance can be achieved by controlling the DWs density using super-coercive voltage. However, a deleterious characteristic of this approach is high-energy cost of polarization reversal due to high leakage current. Here, we demonstrate a new approach based on tuning the conductivity of DWs themselves rather than on domain rearrangement. Using LiNbO3 capacitors with graphene, we show that resistance of a device set to a polydomain state can be continuously tuned by application of sub-coercive voltage. The tuning mechanism is based on the reversible transition between the conducting and insulating states of DWs.The developed approach allows an energy-efficient control of resistance without the need for domain structure modification. The developed memristive devices are promising for multi-level memories and neuromorphic computing applications.

Kelvin probe force microscopy (KPFM) has been used to directly and quantitatively measure Hall voltages, developed at conducting tail-to-tail domain walls in ErMnO single crystals, when current is driven in the presence of an approximately perpendicular magnetic field. Measurements across a number of walls, taken using two different atomic force microscope platforms, consistently suggest that the active p-type carriers have unusually large room temperature mobilities of the order of hundreds of square centimeters per volt second. Associated carrier densities were estimated to be of the order of 10 cm. Such mobilities, at room temperature, are high in comparison with both bulk oxide conductors and LaAlO-SrTiO sheet conductors. High carrier mobilities are encouraging for the future of domain-wall nanoelectronics and, significantly, also suggest the feasibility of meaningful investigations into dimensional confinement effects in these novel domain-wall systems.