Liquid Phase Electro-Epitaxy of Memristive LiNbO₂ Crystals

The growth of seeded and self-nucleated LiNbO₂ crystals with a simplified chemistry has been demonstrated using a liquid phase electro-epitaxy method at high temperatures (900 °C). X-ray diffraction (XRD) was used to quantify the crystal quality and confirmed that both the seeded and self-nucleated crystals grown were single-orientation; the full width at half-maximum (FWHM) for the symmetric XRD double crystal diffraction scan was 230 arcsec, while the FWHM for the XRD omega rocking curve was 19.2 arcmin and 310 arcsec for self-nucleated and seeded crystals, respectively. The LiNbO₂ crystals have undetectable amounts of contamination as determined via X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and secondary ion mass spectrometry. Finally, as-grown LiNbO₂ crystals were shown to exhibit a memristive response and could be utilized in future neuromorphic computing architectures.