Abstract
We report the existence of two competing mechanisms in the current-driven electrical breakdown of vanadium sesquioxide (${\mathrm{V}}_{2}{\mathrm{O}}_{3}$) and vanadium dioxide ($\mathrm{V}{\mathrm{O}}_{2}$) nanodevices. Our experiments and simulations show that the competition between a purely electronic (PE) mechanism and an electrothermal (ET) mechanism, suppressed in nanoscale devices, explains the current-driven insulator-to-metal phase transition (IMT). We find that the relative contribution of PE and ET effects is dictated by thermal coupling and resistivity, a discovery which disambiguates a long-standing controversy surrounding the physical nature of the current-driven IMT in vanadium oxides. Furthermore, we show that the electrothermally driven IMT occurs through a nanoscopic surface-confined filament. This nanoconfined filament has a very large thermal gradient, thus generating a large Seebeck-effect electric field.
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