Nanoscale mapping of temperature-dependent conduction in an epitaxial VO2 film grown on an Al2O3 substrate.

Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is one of the extensively studied strongly correlated oxides due to its intriguing insulator-metal transition near room temperature. In this work, we investigated temperature-dependent nanoscale conduction in an epitaxial VO2 film grown on an Al2O3 substrate using conductive-atomic force microscopy (C-AFM). We observed that only the regions near the grain boundaries are conductive, producing intriguing donut patterns in C-AFM images. Such donut patterns were observed in the entire measured temperature range (300-355 K). The current values near the grain boundaries increased by approximately two orders of magnitude with an increase in the temperature, which is consistent with the macroscopic transport data. The spatially-varied conduction behavior is ascribed to the coexistence of different monoclinic phases, i.e., M1 and M2 phases, based on the results of temperature-dependent Raman spectroscopy. Furthermore, we investigated the conduction mechanism in the relatively conductive M1 phase regions at room temperature using current-voltage (I-V) spectroscopy and deep data analysis. Bayesian linear unmixing and k-means clustering showed three distinct types of conduction behavior, which classical C-AFM cannot resolve. We found that the conduction in the M1 phase regions can be explained by the Poole-Frenkel mechanism. This work provides deep insight into IMT behavior in the epitaxial VO2 thin film at the nanoscale, especially the coexistence and evolution of the M1 and M2 phases. This work also highlights that I-V spectroscopy combined with deep data analysis is very powerful in investigating local transport in complex oxides and various material systems.