Room-temperature ferroelectricity in van der Waals SnP₂S₆

Abstract

Two-dimensional (2D) ferroelectric materials, which possess electrically switchable spontaneous polarization and can be easily integrated with semiconductor technologies, is of utmost importance in the advancement of high-integration low-power nanoelectronics. Despite the experimental discovery of certain 2D ferroelectric materials such as CuInP₂S₆ and In₂Se₃, achieving stable ferroelectricity at room temperature in these materials continues to present a significant challenge. Herein, stable ferroelectric order at room temperature in the 2D limit is demonstrated in van der Waals SnP₂S₆ atom layers, which can be fabricated via mechanical exfoliation of bulk SnP₂S₆ crystals. Switchable polarization is observed in thin SnP₂S₆ of ~7 nm. Importantly, a van der Waals ferroelectric field-effect transistor (Fe-FET) with ferroelectric SnP₂S₆ as top-gate insulator and p-type WTe_0.6Se_1.4 as the channel was designed and fabricated successfully, which exhibits a clear clockwise hysteresis loop in transfer characteristics, demonstrating ferroelectric properties of SnP₂S₆ atomic layers. In addition, a multilayer graphene/SnP₂S₆/multilayer graphene van der Waals vertical heterostructure phototransistor was also fabricated successfully, exhibiting improved optoelectronic performances with a responsivity (R) of 2.9 A/W and a detectivity (D) of 1.4 × 10¹² Jones. Our results show that SnP₂S₆ is a promising 2D ferroelectric material for ferroelectric-integrated low-power 2D devices.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

two-dimensional ferroelectric materials / ferroelectric field-effect transistors / photodetectors

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Declarations

The authors declare that they have no competing interests and there are no conflicts.

Electronic supplementary materials

The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-023-1369-0 and https://journal.hep.com.cn/fop/EN/10.1007/s11467-023-1369-0.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Nos. 2021YFE0194200 and 2021YFA1200903), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 22175203), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (Nos. 2022B1515020065 and 2020A1515110821), and the Guangzhou Science and Technology Project (No. 202102020126). This work was also supported by the Plan Fostering Project of State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies, of Sun Yat-sen University (No. OEMT-2021-PZ-02).

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