Electronic ferroelectricity in monolayer graphene moiré superlattices.

Extending ferroelectric materials to two-dimensional limit provides versatile applications for the development of next-generation nonvolatile devices. Conventional ferroelectricity requires materials consisting of at least two constituent elements associated with polar crystalline structures. Monolayer graphene as an elementary two-dimensional material unlikely exhibits ferroelectric order due to its highly centrosymmetric hexagonal lattices.

Engineering band structures of two-dimensional materials with remote moiré ferroelectricity.

The stacking order and twist angle provide abundant opportunities for engineering band structures of two-dimensional materials, including the formation of moiré bands, flat bands, and topologically nontrivial bands. The inversion symmetry breaking in rhombohedral-stacked transitional metal dichalcogenides endows them with an interfacial ferroelectricity associated with an out-of-plane electric polarization. By utilizing twist angle as a knob to construct rhombohedral-stacked transitional metal dichalcogenides, antiferroelectric domain networks with alternating out-of-plane polarization can be generated.

Inversion Symmetry-Broken Tetralayer Graphene Probed by Second-Harmonic Generation.

Stacking orders provide a unique way to tune the properties of two-dimensional materials. Recently, ABCB-stacked tetralayer graphene has been predicted to possess atypical elemental ferroelectricity arising from its symmetry breaking but has been experimentally explored very little. Here, we observe pronounced nonlinear optical second-harmonic generation (SHG) in ABCB-stacked tetralayer graphene while absent in both ABAB- and ABCA-stacked allotropes.