Although phase transitions have long been a centerpiece of condensed matter materials science studies, a number of recent efforts focus on potentially exploiting the resulting functional property changes in novel electronics and photonics as well as understanding emergent phenomena. This is quite timely, given a grand challenge in twenty-first-century physical sciences is related to enabling continued advances in information processing and storage beyond conventional CMOS scaling. In this brief review, we discuss synthesis of strongly correlated oxides, mechanisms of metal-insulator transitions, and exploratory electron devices that are being studied. Particular emphasis is placed on vanadium dioxide, which undergoes a sharp metal-insulator transition near room temperature at ultrafast timescales. The article begins with an introduction to metal-insulator transition in oxides, followed by a brief discussion on the mechanisms leading to the phase transition. The role of materials synthesis in influencing functional properties is discussed briefly. Recent efforts on realizing novel devices such as field effect switches, optical detectors, nonlinear circuit components, and solid-state sensors are reviewed. The article concludes with a brief discussion on future research directions that may be worth consideration.

We show that perfect absorption can be achieved in a system comprising a single lossy dielectric layer of thickness much smaller than the incident wavelength on an opaque substrate by utilizing the nontrivial phase shifts at interfaces between lossy media. This design is implemented with an ultra-thin ($k/65) vanadium dioxide (VO 2) layer on sapphire, temperature tuned in the vicinity of the VO 2 insulator-tometal phase transition, leading to 99.75% absorption at k ¼ 11.6 lm. The structural simplicity and large tuning range (from $80% to 0.25% in reflectivity) are promising for thermal emitters, modulators, and bolometers. V

Reproducible Sb-doped p-type ZnO films were grown on n-Si (100) by electron-cyclotron-resonance-assisted molecular-beam epitaxy. The existence of Sb in ZnO:Sb films was confirmed by low-temperature photoluminescence measurements. An acceptor-bound exciton (A°X) emission was observed at 3.358 eV at 8 K. The acceptor energy level of the Sb dopant is estimated to be 0.2 eV above the valence band. Temperature-dependent Hall measurements were performed on Sb-doped ZnO films. At room temperature, one Sb-doped ZnO sample exhibited a low resistivity of 0.2Ωcm, high hole concentration of 1.7×1018cm−3 and high mobility of 20.0cm2∕Vs. This study suggests that Sb is an excellent dopant for reliable and reproducible p-type ZnO fabrication.

Electrically driven metal-insulator transition in vanadium dioxide (VO 2 ) is of interest in emerging memory devices, neural computation, and high speed electronics. We report on the fabrication of out-of-plane VO 2 metal-insulator-metal (MIM) structures and reproducible high-speed switching measurements in these two-terminal devices. We have observed a clear correlation between electrically-driven ON/OFF current ratio and thermally-induced resistance change during metal-insulator transition. It is also found that sharp metal-insulator transition could be triggered by external voltage pulses within 2 ns at room temperature and the achieved ON/OFF ratio is greater than two orders of magnitude with good endurance.

The distinct visible electroluminescence (EL) at room temperature has been realized based on n-ZnO∕p-Si heterojunction. The EL peak energy coincided well with the deep-level photoluminescence of ZnO, suggesting that the EL emission was originated from the radiative recombination via deep-level defects in n-ZnO layers. The transport mechanisms of the diodes have been discussed with the characteristics of current-voltage (I-V) and light-output–voltage (L-V), in terms of the energy band diagram of ZnO∕Si heterojunction. The tunneling mechanism via deep-level states was the main conduction process at low forward bias, while space-charge-limited current conduction dominated the carrier transport at higher bias. Light-output–current (L-I) characteristic of the diode followed a power law such as L∼Im, which showed a superlinear behavior at low injection current and became almost linear due to the saturation of nonradiative recombination centers at high current level.

Electrically pumped ZnO quantum well diode lasers are reported. Sb-doped p-type ZnO/Ga-doped n-type ZnO with an MgZnO/ZnO/MgZnO quantum well embedded in the junction was grown on Si by molecular beam epitaxy. The diodes emit lasing at room temperature with a very low threshold injection current density of 10 A / cm 2. The lasing mechanism is exciton-related recombination and the feedback is provided by close-loop scattering from closely packed nanocolumnar ZnO grains formed on Si.

We demonstrate that the resonances of infrared plasmonic antennas can be tuned or switched on/off by taking advantage of the thermally driven insulator-to-metal phase transition in vanadium dioxide (VO(2)). Y-shaped antennas were fabricated on a 180 nm film of VO(2) deposited on a sapphire substrate, and their resonances were shown to depend on the temperature of the VO(2) film in proximity of its phase transition, in good agreement with full-wave simulations. We achieved tunability of the resonance wavelength of approximately 10% (>1 μm at λ~10 μm).

We investigated photoluminescence ͑PL͒ from reliable and reproducible Sb-doped p-type ZnO films grown on n-Si ͑100͒ by molecular-beam epitaxy. Well-resolved PL spectra were obtained from completely dopant-activated samples with hole concentrations above 1.0ϫ 10 18 cm −3. From free electron to acceptor transitions, acceptor binding energy of 0.14 eV is determined, which is in good agreement with analytical results of the temperature-dependent PL measurements. Another broad peak at 3.050 eV, which shifts to lower energy at higher temperatures, indicates the formation of deep acceptor level bands related to Zn vacancies, which are created by Sb doping.