Atomically sharp domain walls (DWs) in ferroelectrics are considered as an ideal platform to realize easy-to-reconfigure nanoelectronic building blocks, created, manipulated and erased by external fields. However, conductive DWs have been exclusively observed in oxides, where DW mobility and conductivity is largely influenced by stoichiometry and defects. In contrast, we here report on conductive DWs in the non-oxide ferroelectric GaV4S8, where charge carriers are provided intrinsically by multivalent V4 molecular clusters. We show that this new mechanism gives rise to DWs composed of nanoscale stripes with alternating electron and hole conduction, unimaginable in oxides. By exerting magnetic control on these segments we promote the mobile and effectively 2D DWs into dominating the 3D conductance, triggering abrupt conductance changes as large as eight orders of magnitude. The flexible valency, as origin of these novel hybrid DWs with giant conductivity, demonstrates that non-oxide ferroelectrics can be the source of novel phenomena beyond the realm of oxide electronics.
@article{arxiv.2105.09659,
title = {Magnetic avalanche of non-oxide conductive domain walls},
author = {Somnath Ghara and Korbinian Geirhos and Lukas Kuerten and Peter Lunkenheimer and Vladimir Tsurkan and Manfred Fiebig and István Kézsmárki},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.09659},
year = {2021}
}