An experimental demonstration of the memristor test

Abstract

A simple and unambiguous test has been recently suggested [J. Phys. D: Applied Physics, 52, 01LT01 (2018)] to check experimentally if a resistor with memory is indeed a memristor, namely a resistor whose resistance depends only on the charge that flows through it, or on the history of the voltage across it. However, although such a test would represent the litmus test for claims about memristors (in the ideal sense), it has yet to be applied widely to actual physical devices. In this paper, we experimentally apply it to a current-carrying wire interacting with a magnetic core, which was recently claimed to be a memristor (so-called `$\Phi$ memristor') [J. Appl. Phys. 125, 054504 (2019)]. The results of our experiment demonstrate unambiguously that this `$\Phi$ memristor' is not a memristor: it is simply an inductor with memory. This demonstration casts further doubts that ideal memristors do actually exist in nature or may be easily created in the lab.