Enhanced stochasticity in irradiated vanadium oxide oscillators

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that focused ion beam irradiation can induce and control stochastic oscillatory behavior in vanadium oxide devices, reducing power consumption and enabling new functionalities through defect engineering.

Contribution

It introduces a method to engineer stochastic oscillations in V2O3 devices via ion irradiation, revealing new dynamic regimes and control over electrical switching behavior.

Findings

Irradiation induces stochastic oscillations in V2O3 devices.

Current flickering becomes more random with increased voltage.

Switching power is significantly reduced after irradiation.

Abstract

Insulator-to-metal transition materials are highly sensitive to even minute deviations of stoichiometry, lattice defects, and disorder, which provides opportunities to engineer their electrical switching characteristics. Using V2O3 as a prototypical metal-insulator transition resistive switching material, we demonstrate that localized focused ion beam irradiation can induce stochastic oscillatory dynamics in simple two-terminal switching devices. After irradiating the material, we observed an unusual dynamic regime where the voltage induced metallic state momentarily collapses into an insulating state, which results in a rapid current flickering that is qualitatively different from the conventional current spiking in a Pearson-Anson type oscillatory circuit implemented using the pristine material. Furthermore, the current flickering timing in the irradiated devices becomes progressively more random and more sparse with increasing input voltage, resulting in nonlinear and nondeterministic oscillatory behavior. The irradiation also leads to a dramatic reduction in switching power required to induce the current oscillations. These results are elucidated through random resistor network simulations which indicate that a small number of local sites can control the electrical metal-insulator transition switching properties in large devices with high defect concentration. Our results show that selective focused ion beam irradiation provides exciting prospects for engineering and tuning novel stochastic behaviors in emergent technologies that rely on the intrinsic randomness of physical processes.