Jumps in current-voltage characteristics in disordered films

TL;DR

This paper explains giant current jumps in disordered films as a bistability caused by electron overheating, with a theoretical model matching experimental data without adjustable parameters.

Contribution

It introduces a parameter-free model attributing current jumps to electron overheating-induced bistability in disordered films.

Findings

Model accurately reproduces experimental I-V characteristics.

Bistability depends on inefficient electron cooling and steep R(T).

Proposes experiments for direct verification of overheating mechanism.

Abstract

We argue that giant jumps of current at finite voltages observed in disordered samples of InO, TiN and YSi manifest a bistability caused by the overheating of electrons. One of the stable states is overheated and thus low-resistive, while the other, high-resistive state is heated much less by the same voltage. The bistability occurs provided that cooling of electrons is inefficient and the temperature dependence of the equilibrium resistance, R(T), is steep enough. We use experimental R(T) and assume phonon mechanism of the cooling taking into account its strong suppression by disorder. Our description of details of the I-V characteristics does not involve adjustable parameters and turns out to be in a quantitative agreement with the experiments. We propose experiments for more direct checks of this physical picture.