Abstract
Recently, nanotechnology plays an important role in lots of high-technical industries. Nanowires possess degrees of freedom associated with their intrinsic shape effect and their ability of incorporation with different components leading to unique properties different from those of bulk materials. The diverse range of applications has resulted in interest in nanowires with a wide range of physical properties. This dissertation focuses on the applications of NiO-based nanowires with different properties including interfacial coupling between ferromagnets and antiferromagnets in Ni/NiO core/shell nanowires and resistive switching characteristics of NiO/Pt multilayered nanowires. Ni/NiO core/shell nanowire arrays composed of a ferromagnetic Ni core and an antiferromagnetic NiO shell were fabricated to investigate the interfacial coupling 1D system. The magnetic behaviors of nanowire arrays are studied by varying the diameter of nanowires ranging from 30 to 100nm. Unusual anisotropy changes were observed in Ni/NiO core/shell nanowires which can be ascribed to the competition between shape anisotropy and exchange anisotropy. The OOMMF simulated results depict the modulated spin structures in NiO/Ni nanowires adjusting the magnitude of both shape anisotropy and in-plane exchange anisotropy by varying thickness ratio of shell and core. The resistive switching characteristics are also discussed in NiO/Pt multilayered nanowires, which can be considered as millions of NiO-based cells collected together. Non-polar resistive switching prevails reproducibly in millions of cells with significantly reduced switching voltages, narrow distributions in switching voltages, and a robust multilevel memory effect. A high resistance ratio (~105) between high and low resistance states in nano-scale cells enables stable multilevels induced easily by a pulsed voltage of various numbers. This dissertation provides possibilities of the applications with nanowire-based devices. For the magnetic application, the spin structures can be modulated by controlling the exchange anisotropy between ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism. In addition, we demonstrate that nanowire-based devices not only have good performance of resistive switching but also help to clarify the conduction mechanism. Our findings are important for the development of nanowire-based device.