Landau-like formalism for the thermal-runaway and filamentation instabilities in switching Mott devices
Abstract
Correlated oxides can switch to a low-resistance state when exposed to a voltage, making these insulator-to-metal transition materials promising candidates for memristor technology. Switching in materials such as VO2 occurs because of a thermal-runaway instability that leads to the abrupt formation of a hot current-carrying metallic filament within the insulator. We study, theoretically and experimentally, this bias-induced switching as a non-linear dynamics stability problem. We construct Landau free energy-like Lyapunov functions to show that both the on-state ("set") and the off-state ("reset") transitions can be described as separate saddle-node bifurcations. Starting from the reaction-diffusion equation for the heat transport, the abrupt snap-back (reset) to the insulating state is systematically formulated as a mean field Landau-like dynamics with the filament width playing the role of the order parameter. The formulation predicts an abrupt first-order phase transition with a break-off of a finite width filament across the current-controlled reset transition. The formulation is quantitatively compared against our electrical and optical microscopy experiments on VO2 thin film devices. Multi-cycle switching dynamics experiments further reveal the emergence of a stable stochastic regime following an initial electro-spatial forming phase. Beyond establishing a cross-disciplinary dynamical framework that may be readily compared to instabilities in various reaction-diffusion scenarios, the work also provides a predictive foundation for the rational design and optimization of Mott-transition-based technologies.
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BibTeX
@misc{bajaj2026landaulike,
title = {{Landau-like formalism for the thermal-runaway and filamentation instabilities in switching Mott devices}},
author = {Aniket Bajaj and Anudeep Tullibilli and Arup Basak and Pavan Nukala and Bhavtosh Bansal},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.01055},
eprint = {2610.01055},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01055},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Landau-like formalism for the thermal-runaway and filamentation instabilities in switching Mott devices
AU - Aniket Bajaj
AU - Anudeep Tullibilli
AU - Arup Basak
AU - Pavan Nukala
AU - Bhavtosh Bansal
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/01
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.01055
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01055
AB - Correlated oxides can switch to a low-resistance state when exposed to a voltage, making these insulator-to-metal transition materials promising candidates for memristor technology. Switching in materials such as VO2 occurs because of a thermal-runaway instability that leads to the abrupt formation of a hot current-carrying metallic filament within the insulator. We study, theoretically and experimentally, this bias-induced switching as a non-linear dynamics stability problem. We construct Landau free energy-like Lyapunov functions to show that both the on-state ("set") and the off-state ("reset") transitions can be described as separate saddle-node bifurcations. Starting from the reaction-diffusion equation for the heat transport, the abrupt snap-back (reset) to the insulating state is systematically formulated as a mean field Landau-like dynamics with the filament width playing the role of the order parameter. The formulation predicts an abrupt first-order phase transition with a break-off of a finite width filament across the current-controlled reset transition. The formulation is quantitatively compared against our electrical and optical microscopy experiments on VO2 thin film devices. Multi-cycle switching dynamics experiments further reveal the emergence of a stable stochastic regime following an initial electro-spatial forming phase. Beyond establishing a cross-disciplinary dynamical framework that may be readily compared to instabilities in various reaction-diffusion scenarios, the work also provides a predictive foundation for the rational design and optimization of Mott-transition-based technologies.
ER -