Influence of oxygen ion elementary diffusion jumps on the electron current through the conductive filament in yttria stabilized zirconia nanometer-sized memristor

Abstract The structure of the electron current through an individual filament of a nanometer-sized virtual memristor consisting of a contact of a conductive atomic force microscope probe to an yttria stabilized zirconia (YSZ) thin film deposited on a conductive substrate is investigated. Usually, such investigation is performed by the analysis of the waveform of this current with the aim to extract the random telegraph noise (RTN). Here, we suggest a new indirect method, which is based on the measurement of the spectrum of the low-frequency flicker noise in this current without extracting the RTN, taking into account the geometrical parameters of the filament. We propose that the flicker no…