Approaching the High Intrinsic Electrical Resistivity of NbO2 in Epitaxially Grown Films

NbO2 is a promising candidate for resistive switching devices due to an insulator-metal transition above room temperature, which is related to a phase transition from a distorted rutile structure to an undistorted one. However, the electrical resistivity of the NbO2 thin films produced so far has been too low to achieve high on-off switching ratios. Here, we report on the structural, electrical, and optical characterization of single-crystalline NbO2 (001) thin films grown by pulsed laser deposition on MgF2 (001) substrates. An annealing step reduced the full width at half maximum of the NbO2 (004) x-ray Bragg reflection by one order of magnitude, while the electrical resistivity of the films increased by two orders of magnitude to about 1k Omega cm at room temperature. Temperature-dependent resistivity measurements of an annealed sample revealed that below 650K, two deep-level defects with activation energies of 0.25eV and 0.37eV dominate the conduction, while above 650K, intrinsic conduction prevails. Optical characterization by spectroscopic ellipsometry and by absorption measurements with the electric field vector of the incident light perpendicular to the c-axis of the distorted rutile structure indicates the onset of fundamental absorption at about 0.76eV at room temperature, while at 4K, the onset shifts to 0.85eV. These optical transitions are interpreted to take place across the theoretically predicted indirect bandgap of distorted rutile NbO2