The journal Nature Communications has just published [1] an article “Fast electronic resistance switching involving hidden charge density wave states”. The research is a synthesis of the experimental work performed at the Laboratory of the Complex Matter led by Dragan Mihailovic at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the theoretical part performed by Serguei Brazovskii at the LPTMS. The experiments have been performed upon a very popular nowadays material TaS2 which basic units are the planes of strongly correlated electrons showing an intriguing competition of cooperative states such the charge density wave, Wigner crystal, Mott insulator, and polaronic lattice. The article describes an ultrafast non-volatile resistance switching under application of short pulsed current injection, where injected charges create domain walls, converting the material from an insulator to a metal at low temperatures. From a technological viewpoint, this opens up the possibility of low-temperature ultrafast memory devices. The theoretical challenge was to identify and to model the mechanism for formation of a network of charged domain walls originated by the intrincic Coulomb instability of the lattice of self-trapped electrons. This work continues an already well established and very successful collaboration between the two laboratories as it has been certified by earlier prestigious publications [2-4].
[1] Nature Communications, 7, 11442 (16 May 2016), Fast electronic resistance switching involving hidden charge density wave states, I. Vaskivskyi, I. A. Mihailovic, S. Brazovskii, J. Gospodaric, T. Mertelj, D. Svetin, P. Sutar and D. Mihailovic .
[2] I. Vaskivskyi, J. Gospodaric, S. Brazovskii, D. Svetin, P. Sutar, E. Goreshnik, I.A. Mihailovic, T. Mertelj, and D. Mihailovic, “Controlling the metal-to-insulator relaxation of the metastable hidden quantum state in 1T-TaS2”, Science Advances, 1, 1500168 (2015).
[3] L. Stojchevska, I. Vaskivskyi, T. Mertelj, P. Kusar, D. Svetin, S. Brazovskii, and D. Mihailovic,
“Ultrafast switching to a stable hidden quantum state in an electronic crystal”, Science, 344, 177 (2014).
[4] R. Yusupov, T. Mertelj, V.V. Kabanov, S. Brazovskii, J.-H. Chu, I. R. Fisher, and D. Mihailovic,
“Coherent dynamics of macroscopic electronic order through a symmetry breaking transition”,
Nature Physics, 6, 681 (2010).