Confining grains of textured Cu2O films to single-crystal nanowires and resultant change in resistive switching characteristics.

By confining columnar grains of textured oxide film using anodized aluminum oxide template, we could obtain a grain-boundary-free (GB-free) cuprous oxide (Cu(2)O) nanowire arrays with a narrow diameter distribution and a high density under the same electrochemical deposition condition. A two-terminal device fabricated using an individual GB-free nanowire and Au/Cr electrodes exhibits bipolar resistive switching contrary to the unipolar one of a textured film, and Schottky-like conduction. On the other hand, a nanowire device with Pt electrodes reveals non-switching behavior and Ohmic conduction. Thus, we can propose that the bipolar switching of a nanowire device with Au/Cr electrodes may result from the modulation of Schottky barrier at the interface by migration of oxygen vacancies while the unipolar one of a textured film may be defined as the bulky filamentary switching along the GBs in the GB-embedded texture films. This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2012