Electrical excitation selects electrothermal hysteretic operating regimes in VO$$_2$$ devices

Abstract Vanadium dioxide (VO $$_2$$ ) exhibits a sharp metal–insulator transition accompanied by intrinsic thermal hysteresis, enabling rich nonlinear electro–thermal dynamics and a broad range of device functionalities. In VO $$_2$$ devices, electrical hysteresis is commonly interpreted as a fixed material fingerprint, although practical operation always occurs within coupled electro–thermal circuits where external excitation strongly constrains the accessible dynamical trajectories. Here we show that the electrical hysteresis observed in VO $$_2$$ is not determined by the material alone, but can be programmably reconfigured through the mode of electrical excitation. Using a unified electro–thermal framework with an event-driven hysteresis formulation, we explicitly separate intrinsic thermal hysteresis from excitation-dependent electrical dynamics and demonstrate that distinct hysteretic operating regimes emerge from the same material platform without modification of intrinsic material parameters. By comparing voltage-driven and current-driven operation under identical material conditions, we show that external load constraints can reshape, widen, suppress, or stabilize the electrical hysteresis while preserving the underlying thermal transition. Current-driven excitation provides continuous access to the constitutive electro–thermal response of the VO $$_2$$ channel, including stable traversal of the negative differential resistance region, whereas voltage-driven operation promotes load-line-controlled switching, abrupt transitions, and oscillatory behavior characteristic of threshold circuits. By anchoring hysteresis evolution to physically meaningful thermal reversal events, the proposed approach enforces causal and solver-independent dynamics across coupled electro–thermal systems. These results establish electrical excitation as a device-level design parameter that programs distinct functional operating regimes within the same VO $$_2$$ platform, providing a general framework for excitation-programmable hysteretic devices and opening new opportunities for adaptive switching, oscillatory electronics, and nonlinear analog functionalities.