G. Stone2, M. Jerry2, H. Wen1, Z. Cai1, H. Paik3, R. Engel-‐Herbery2, D. Schlom3, S. DaCa2, V. Gopalan2 at 1 Argonne; 2 Penn State; 3,Cornell NSF DMR-‐0820404
A current passed through VO2 destabilizes the monoclinic semiconducting phase and induces a phase transition to the tetragonal metallic phase. While the electronic transition to the low resistance state is very fast, a complex and unexpected spatially varying structural distortion pattern is detected, lagging behind the electronic transition. These “structural aftershocks” reveal a complex interplay of electronic and structural phase transitions in VO2 on ultrashort time scales in a device configuration which is of high relevance for newly proposed low power logic devices, such as hyper-FETs (10.1038/ncomms8812) or VO2 oscillator based non-Boolean computing (10.1038/srep04964)
