The increasing demand for information storage makes the development of advanced materials and regulation strategies urgent, integrating low-power consumption with a rapid resistive switching behavior. Perovskite nickelates, leveraging their unique metal-insulator transition, emerge as an ideal material platform for resistive switching applications. However, traditional modulation strategies (such as strain, electric fields, and ionic liquids) remain plagued by energy inefficiency and response hysteresis. Here, we demonstrate a visible light-modulated metal-insulator transition in NdNiO3 photovoltaic heterostructures, achieving 2 orders of magnitude resistivity switching under low-intensity 20 mW·cm-2 (0.2 sun) illumination with transient time. The photoinduced electron doping makes Ni 3d-orbital reconstruction to present the metallic behavior, where its upper Hubbard band broadens and is below the Fermi level. Nevertheless, these charged VO existing in the NdNiO3-δ interlayer would serve as charge recombination centers and severe electron-hole pair quenching, thereby aggravating the insulating behavior. By integrating multilevel resistive switching tunability (changing light intensity or temperature) and high-fidelity state reproducibility, our work establishes NdNiO3 photovoltaic heterostructures to provide a new research platform for low-power optoelectronic memory and neuromorphic computing.
Zhao et al. (Thu,) studied this question.