Interplay of ferroelectricity and single electron tunneling

Abstract

We investigate the interplay of ferroelectricity and quantum electron transport at the nanoscale in the regime of Coulomb blockade. Ferroelectric polarization in this case is no longer the external parameter but should be self-consistently calculated along with electron hopping probabilities leading to new physical transport phenomena studying in this paper. These phenomena appear mostly due to effective screening of a grain electric field by ferroelectric environment rather than due to polarization dependent tunneling probabilities. At small bias voltages polarization can be switched by a single excess electron in the grain. In this case transport properties of SET exhibit the instability (memory effect).