Room-temperature ferroelectric, piezoelectric and resistive switching behaviors of single-element Te nanowires

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.