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American Institute of Physics, Applied Physics Letters, 4(90), p. 043513

DOI: 10.1063/1.2431443

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Impact of interfacial roughness on tunneling conductance and extracted barrier parameters

Journal article published in 2007 by Casey W. Miller, Zhi-Pan Li, Johan Akerman, Ivan K. Schuller
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

The net tunneling conductance of metal-insulator-metal tunnel junctions is studied using a distribution of barrier thicknesses consistent with interfacial roughness typical of state-of-the-art tunnel junctions. Moderate amounts of roughness cause the conductance to resemble that of much thinner and taller barriers. Fitting numerically generated conductance data that include roughness with models that assume a single-thickness barrier leads to erroneous results for both the barrier height and width. Rules of thumb are given that connect the roughness to the real space mean thickness and the thickness inferred from fitting the net conductance with traditional tunneling models.