Effect of Deep Traps on the Barrier Heights of Metal-Insulator-Metal Tunnel Junctions

Abstract

It is shown that the potential barrier ${\varphi }_{max}$ in a thin-film metal-insulator-metal system increases rapidly with increasing insulator thickness when electrons are immobilized in deep traps in the insulator, and at low voltage biases $\frac{d{\varphi }_{max}}{\mathrm{dV}}$ is independent of the insulator parameters. This effect may be an explanation of the observations of Lewicki and Mead.