Characteristics of the Current-Controlled Phase Transition of VO₂ Microwires for Hybrid Optoelectronic Devices

The optical and electrical characteristics of the insulator-metal phase transition of vanadium dioxide (VO₂) enable the realization of power-efficient, miniaturized hybrid optoelectronic devices. This work studies the current-controlled, two-step insulator-metal phase transition of VO₂ in varying microwire geometries. Geometry-dependent scaling trends extracted from current-voltage measurements show that the first step induced by carrier injection is delocalized over the microwire, while the second, thermally-induced step is localized to a filament about 1 to 2 μm wide for 100 nm-thick sputtered VO₂ films on SiO₂. These effects are confirmed by direct infrared imaging, which also measures the change in optical absorption in the two steps. The difference between the threshold currents of the two steps increases as the microwires are narrowed. Micron- and sub-micron-wide VO₂ structures can be used to separate the two phase transition steps in photonic and electronic devices. View Full-Text