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