Analysis of Leakage Current Mechanisms in BiFeO₃ Thin Films

Abstract

Phonon-assisted tunneling (PhAT) model is applied for explication of temperature-dependent I-V characteristics measured by other investigators for BiFeO₃ films. Our proposed model describes well not only current dependence on temperature measured in a wide temperature range but also temperature-dependent I-V data using the same set of parameters characterizing material under investigation. The values of active phonons energy and field strength for tunneling are estimated from the fit of current dependence on temperature and I-V-T data with the two different phonon-assisted tunnelling theories.

Keywords:

• Ferroelectrics
• phonon-assisted tunneling
• I-V characteristics

PACS:

• 77.55.fp
• 73.50.Fq
• 73.43.Jn
• 63.20.kd