Negative differential resistance in novel nanoscale devices

Abstract

Negative differential resistance (NDR) is a physical effect, which is widespread in quantum electronics from tunneling diodes up to memristors. Although NDR has been discovered many decades ago, there are still hundreds of papers published in the last years dealing with this effect. Since many quantum devices are nowadays fabricated at atomic scale, the NDR effect opens new applications. This manuscript is an overview of various physical phenomena, which produce NDR effects in nanoscale devices. These phenomena include quantum tunneling, the ballistic electronic transport in nanostructures and insulator–metal transitions, which are common in nanoscale devices for high-frequency applications or for new computing architectures, such as reversible computation, quantum computation and neuromorphic computing.