Room-temperature ferroelectric, piezoelectric and resistive switching behaviors of single-element Te nanowires
Jinlei Zhang, Jiayong Zhang, Yaping Qi, Shuainan Gong, Hang Xu, Zhenqi Liu, Ran Zhang, Mohammad A. Sadi, Demid Sychev, Run Zhao, Hongbin Yang, Zhenping Wu, Dapeng Cui, Lin Wang, Chunlan Ma, Xiaoshan Wu, Ju Gao, Yong P. Chen, Xinran Wang, Yu‐Cheng Jiang
Abstract
Ferroelectrics are essential in memory devices for multi-bit storage and high-density integration. Ferroelectricity mainly exists in compounds but rare in single-element materials due to their lack of spontaneous polarization in the latter. However, we report a room-temperature ferroelectricity in quasi-one-dimensional Te nanowires. Piezoelectric characteristics, ferroelectric loops and domain reversals are clearly observed. 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, giving rise to a self-gated ferroelectric field-effect transistor. By utilizing ferroelectric Te nanowire as channel, the device exhibits high mobility (~220 cm2·V−1·s−1), continuous-variable resistive states can be observed with long-term retention (>105 s), fast speed (<20 ns) and high-density storage (>1.92 TB/cm2). Our work provides opportunities for single-element ferroelectrics and advances practical applications such as ultrahigh-density data storage and computing-in-memory devices. Authors find room-temperature ferroelectricity in single element Te nanowires, highlighting that reducing dimensions to 1D in low-dimensional piezoelectric materials with chain structures is an effective strategy to induce ferroelectricity absent in their 2D form.