Room-temperature multiferroicity in sliding van der Waals semiconductors with sub-0.3 V switching

Rui Chen; Fanhao Meng; Hongrui Zhang; Yuzi Liu; Shancheng Yan; Xilong Xu; Linghan Zhu; Jiazhen Chen; Tao Zhou; Jingcheng Zhou; Fuyi Yang; Penghong Ci; Xiaoxi Huang; Xianzhe Chen; Tiancheng Zhang; Yuhang Cai; Kaichen Dong; Yin Liu; Kenji Watanabe; Takashi Taniguchi; Chia-Ching Lin; Ashish Verma Penumatcha; Ian Young; Emory Chan; Junqiao Wu; Li Yang; Ramamoorthy Ramesh; Jie Yao

doi:10.1038/s41467-025-58009-9

Journal article Room-temperature multiferroicity in sliding van der Waals semiconductors with sub-0.3 V switching

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Rui Chen, Fanhao Meng, Hongrui Zhang, Yuzi Liu, Shancheng Yan, Xilong Xu, Linghan Zhu, Jiazhen Chen, Tao Zhou, Jingcheng Zhou, Fuyi Yang, Penghong Ci, Xiaoxi Huang, Xianzhe Chen, Tiancheng Zhang, Yuhang Cai, Kaichen Dong, Yin Liu, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi, Chia-Ching Lin, Ashish Verma Penumatcha, Ian Young, Emory Chan, Junqiao Wu, Li Yang, Ramamoorthy Ramesh, Jie Yao. Room-temperature multiferroicity in sliding van der Waals semiconductors with sub-0.3 V switching. Nature Communications. 2025, 16 (1), 3648. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58009-9

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The search for van der Waals (vdW) multiferroic materials has been challenging but also holds great potential for the next-generation multifunctional nanoelectronics. The group-IV monochalcogenide, with an anisotropic puckered structure and an intrinsic in-plane polarization at room temperature, manifests itself as a promising candidate with coupled ferroelectric and ferroelastic order as the basis for multiferroic behavior. Unlike the intrinsic centrosymmetric AB stacking, we demonstrate a multiferroic phase of tin selenide (SnSe), where the inversion symmetry breaking is maintained in AA-stacked multilayers over a wide range of thicknesses. We observe that an interlayer-sliding-induced out-of-plane (OOP) ferroelectric polarization couples with the in-plane (IP) one, making it possible to control out-of-plane polarization via in-plane electric field and vice versa. Notably, thickness scaling yields a sub-0.3 V ferroelectric switching, which promises future low-power-consumption applications. Furthermore, coexisting armchair- and zigzag-like structural domains are imaged under electron microscopy, providing experimental evidence for the degenerate ferroelastic ground states theoretically predicted. Non-centrosymmetric SnSe, as the first layered multiferroic at room temperature, provides a novel platform not only to explore the interactions between elementary excitations with controlled symmetries, but also to efficiently tune the device performance via external electric and mechanical stress.

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