Electric-field-induced resistance switching （RS） phenomena have been studied for over 60 years in metal/dielectrics/metal structures. In these experiments a wide range of dielectrics have been studied including binary transition metal oxides, perovskite oxides, chalcogenides, carbon- and silicon-based materials, as well as organic materials. RS phenomena can be used to store information and offer an attractive performance, which encompasses fast switching speeds, high scalability, and the desirable compatibility with Si-based complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor fabrication. This is promising for nonvolatile memory technology, i.e., resistance random access memory （RRAM）. However, a comprehensive understanding of the underlying mechanism is still lacking. This impedes faster product development as well as accurate assessment of the device performance potential. Generally speaking, RS occurs not in the entire dielectric but only in a small, confined region, which results from the local variation of conductivity in dielectrics. In this review, we focus on the RS in oxides with such an inhomogeneous conductivity. According to the origin of the conductivity inhomogeneity, the RS phenomena and their working mechanism are reviewed by dividing them into two aspects： interface RS, based on the change of contact resistance at metal/oxide interface due to the change of Schottky barrier and interface chemical layer, and bulk RS, realized by the formation, connection, and disconnection of conductive channels in the oxides. Finally the current challenges of RS investigation and the potential improvement of the RS performance for the nonvolatile memories are discussed.
We investigate the growing condition dependences of magnetic and electric properties of the La2/3Sr1/3MnO3 thin films grown on SrTiO3（001） substrates.With reducing the film thickness and growth pressure,the Curie temperature（Tc）drops off,and the magnetism and metallicity are suppressed.At an appropriate deposition temperature,we can obtain the best texture and remarkably enhance the magnetic and electrical properties.However,the resistivity of film cannot be modulated by changing the dc current and green light intensity.This result may be induced by the coherent strains in the epitaxially grown film due to its lattice mismatching that of the SrTiO3 substrate.Furthermore,we show that the relations between the magnetism and the resistivity for the typical films with different thickness values.For the 13.4-nm-thick film,the R-T curve presents two transition behaviors：insulator-to-metal and metal-to-insulator in the cooling process：the former corresponds to magnetic transition,and the later correlates with thermal excitation conduction.
The anisotropic transport property was investigated in a phase separation La（0.67）Ca（0.33）MnO3（LCMO） film grown on（001）-oriented Nd GaO3（NGO） substrate. It was found that the resistivity along the b-axis is much higher than that along the a-axis. Two resistivity peaks were observed in the temperature dependent measurement along the b-axis, one located at 91 K and the other centered at 165 K. Moreover, we also studied the response of the resistivities along the two axes to various electric currents, magnetic fields, and light illuminations. The resistivities along the two axes are sensitive to the magnetic field. However, the electric current and light illumination can influence the resistivity along the b-axis obviously, but have little effect on the resistivity along the a-axis. Based on these results, we believe that an anisotropicstrain-controlled MnO6 octahedra shear-mode deformation may provide a mechanism of conduction filaments paths along the a-axis, which leads to the anisotropic transport property.
