Light-Tunable Resistive Switching Properties of a BiFeO₃/Ti₃C₂ Heterostructure Memristor

Improvement of memristors’ performance is of great significance for the development of artificial intelligence and electronic circuits. Among them, the development of optical memristors is very important for simulating the process of receiving information from a visual system. In this work, a BiFeO₃-based memristor was fabricated and its performance was enhanced by adding Ti₃C₂ to form a heterojunction structure. The Ag/BiFeO₃/Ti₃C₂/FTO memristor exhibited a stable coexistence of resistive switching and negative different resistance at room temperature. After data fitting and calculation, electron transmission in the forward voltage bias region was dominated by Schottky emission and F–N tunneling, while in the negative voltage bias region, it was mainly Schottky emission. It was also found that the device could be tunable by light. The high resistance state/low resistance state ratio obtained under illumination was ~ 9.2, which is more than twice as high as that under normal conditions. The reason for the improvement of the device’s performance under illumination conditions was considered to be the photoelectric field generated which led to the electron motion being suppressed.