Control of charge order melting through local memristive migration of oxygen vacancies

The colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) in perovskite manganites and the resistive switching (RS) effect in metal-oxide heterostructures have both attracted intensive attention in the past decades. Up to date, however, there has been surprisingly little effort to study the CMR phenomena by employing a memristive switch or by integrating the CMR and memristive properties in a single RS device. Here, we report a memristive control of the melting of the antiferromagnetic charge ordered (AFM-CO) state in ${\mathrm{La}}_{0.5}{\mathrm{Ca}}_{0.5}{\mathrm{MnO}}_{3\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\delta}}$ epitaxial films. We show that an in situ electrotailoring of the boundary condition, which results in layers of oxygen vacancies at the metal-oxide interface, can not only suppress the critical magnetic field for the AFM-CO state melting in the interfacial memristive domain, but also promote the one in the common pristine domain of the RS device in the high and low resistive states. Our study thereby highlights the pivotal roles of functional oxygen vacancies and their dynamics in strong correlation physics and electronics.