Electrical-field-driven metal-insulator transition tuned with self-aligned atomic defects.

Recently, significant attention has been paid to the resistance switching (RS) behaviour in Fe3O4 and it was explained through the analogy of the electrically driven metal-insulator transition based on the quantum tunneling theory. Here, we propose a method to experimentally support this explanation and provide a way to tune the critical switching parameter by introducing self-aligned localized impurities through the growth of Fe3O4 thin films on stepped SrTiO3 substrates. Anisotropic behavior in the RS was observed, where a lower switching voltage in the range of 10(4) V cm(-1) is required to switch Fe3O4 from a high conducting state to a low conducting state when the electrical field is applied along the steps.

Enhanced Shubnikov-De Haas Oscillation in Nitrogen-Doped Graphene.

N-doped graphene displays many interesting properties compared with pristine graphene, which makes it a potential candidate in many applications. Here, we report that the Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) oscillation effect in graphene can be enhanced by N-doping. We show that the amplitude of the SdH oscillation increases with N-doping and reaches around 5k Ω under a field of 14 T at 10 K for highly N-doped graphene, which is over 1 order of magnitude larger than the value found for pristine graphene devices with the same geometry.