□ Prof. Jaichan LEE at Sungkyunkwan University, Korea, Prof. Chang-Beom EOM at University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, and coworkers reported a metal-insulator transition in VO₂ occuring without structural change but only electronic change by decoupling structure and electronics.

□ Metal-insulator transition in strongly correlated materials has been a central issue in fundamental science and technology. The metal-insulator transition is typically accompanied by structural phase transition, which makes it difficult to unveil the primary mechanism of the transition. Extensive debate has continued on the primary mechanism either electron-lattice (Peierls transition) interaction or electron-electron interaction (Mott transition).

□ VO₂ is an archetypal correlated material and has a metal-insulator transition specifically near room temperature, which provides great advantage in the device application. However, the device application has been limited because of the coupling of electronic and structural transitions.

□ The research team decoupled the structural and electronic transitions in VO₂ and demonstrated only electronic metal-insulator transition heterostructure engineering.

□ Prof. Jaichan Lee said that this discovery and approach could be extended to correlated materials to unveil many unconventional phenomena and get a wide variety of material functionality.

□ The article is published in Science 362, 1037 (2018).