A promising vanadium dioxide transistor

The principle behind the classic transistor is the use of an external voltage to control the electrical conductivity of a nanometre-sized conducting channel near the surface of the device material. This paper reports the development of a conceptually new type of transistor in which an electric field controls the electronic properties of the whole of the device. This is made possible by using, instead of silicon, the strongly correlated material vanadium dioxide. The application of just one volt, at room temperature, switches the material from being an insulator to having a metallic ground state on a macroscopic scale and gives rise to a non-volatile memory effect, making it of great practical interest for applications including the remote transmission of electrical signals and voltage-tunable optical switching.