Modeling Resistive Switching in Nanogranular Metal Films

TL;DR

This paper models resistive switching in nanogranular gold films using effective medium theory, revealing that thermal structural rearrangements explain the observed electrical behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a novel modeling approach applying Bruggeman's effective medium approximation to understand resistive switching in nanogranular films.

Findings

Resistive switching can be explained by thermally induced local structural changes.

The model successfully correlates microscopic structure with macroscopic electrical behavior.

Effective medium approximation provides a useful framework for analyzing nanogranular materials.

Abstract

Films produced by assembling bare gold clusters well beyond the electrical percolation threshold show a resistive switching behavior whose investigation has started only recently. Here we address the challenge to charaterize the resistance of a nanogranular film starting from limited information on the structure at the microscopic scale by the means of Bruggeman's approach to multicomponent media, within the framework of Effective Medium Approximations. The approach is used to build a model that proves that the observed resistive switching can be explained by thermally regulated local structural rearrangements.