Poole-Frenkel-effect as dominating current mechanism in thin oxide films—An illusion?!

By H. Schroeder. 2015

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In many of the publications, over 50 per year for the last five years, the Poole-Frenkel-effect (PFE) is identified or suggested as dominating current mechanism to explain measured current–electric field dependencies in metal-insulator-metal (MIM) thin film stacks. Very often, the insulating thin film is a metal oxide as this class of materials has many important applications, especially in information technology. In the overwhelming majority of the papers, the identification of the PFE as dominating current mechanism is made by the slope of the current–electric field curve in the so-called Poole-Frenkel plot, i.e., logarithm of current density, j, divided by the applied electric field, F, versus the square root of that field. This plot is suggested by the simplest current equation for the PFE, which comprises this proportionality (ln(j/F) vs. F1/2) leading to a straight line in this plot. Only one other parameter (except natural constants) may influence this slope: the optical dielectric constant of the ...

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/be5bca09403e252339805cf9eb9dd37c20380973