Volume Contraction Upon Resistive Switching in Cr‐Doped V2O3 as a Key Mechanism for Mottronics Applications

Abstract The rise of the electronic age sparked a quest for increasingly faster and smaller switches, since this element is ubiquitous and foundational in any electronic circuit to regulate the flow of current. Mott insulators are promising candidates to meet this need as they undergo extremely fast resistive switching under electric field initiated by an avalanche phenomena. However, the nature of the final switched state is still under debate. The spatially resolved micro‐X‐ray Diffraction  imaging and micro‐Raman experiments carried out on the prototypal Mott insulator (V0.95Cr0.05)2O3 show that the resistive switching is associated with the creation of a conducting filamentary path consisting in an isosymmetric compressed phase without any chemical or symmetry change. This strongly suggests that the avalanche initiated resistive switching mechanism is inherited from the bandwidth‐controlled Mott‐Hubbard transition just like the laser induced insulator to metal transition recently studied in the same system. This discovery may hence ease the development of a new branch of electronics called Mottronics.