Observation of room-temperature ferroelectricity in elemental Te nanowires
Abstract
Ferroelectrics are essential in low-dimensional memory devices for multi-bit storage and high-density integration. A polar structure is a necessary premise for ferroelectricity, mainly existing in compounds. However, it is usually rare in elemental materials, causing a lack of spontaneous electric polarization. Here, we report an unexpected room-temperature ferroelectricity in few-chain Te nanowires. Out-of-plane ferroelectric loops and domain reversal are observed by piezoresponse force microscopy. Through density functional theory, we attribute the ferroelectricity to the ion-displacement created by the interlayer interaction between lone pair electrons. Ferroelectric polarization can induce a strong field effect on the transport along the Te chain, supporting a self-gated field-effect transistor. It enables a nonvolatile memory with high in-plane mobility, zero supply voltage, multilevel resistive states, and a high on/off ratio. Our work provides new opportunities for elemental ferroelectrics with polar structures and paves a way towards applications such as low-power dissipation electronics and computing-in-memory devices.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2211.04066,
title = {Observation of room-temperature ferroelectricity in elemental Te nanowires},
author = {Jinlei Zhang and Jiayong Zhang and Yaping Qi and Shuainan Gong and Run Zhao and Hongbin Yang and Zhenping Wu and Dapeng Cui and Lin Wang and Chunlan Ma and Ju Gao and Yong P. Chen and Yucheng Jiang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.04066},
year = {2022}
}