Effect of substrate and growth method on vanadium dioxide thin films by RF magnetron sputtering: Vanadium metal oxidation vs reactive sputtering

Vanadium dioxide (VO2) undergoes a metal–insulator phase transition at ∼70 °C and has attracted substantial interest for potential applications in electronics, including those neuromorphic computing. The vanadium–oxygen system rather complicated diagram, controlling the stoichiometry of thin films vanadium oxides is well-known challenge. We explore novel combination two methods VO2 film deposition using off-axis RF magnetron sputtering on (100)- (111)-oriented yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ) substrates: reactive an oxygen environment metal followed by oxidation to VO2. Interestingly, process both substrate orientations yields metastable semiconducting (B) phase, which structurally stabilized YSZ surface. produces mainly equilibrium monoclinic (or M1) that exhibits transition. Using this method, we obtained (010)-textured polycrystalline (M1) show with on/off ratio larger than 1000.