2025/09/30 by Daniel Brandon, Brandon, Daniel, Tixuan Tan +16
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Memory and Neural Computing #Bistability #FOS: Physical sciences #Ferromagnetism #Graphene #Graphene research and applications #Magnetism #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Metastability #Phase (matter) #Phase transition #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Spintronics #Stacking
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.00220
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University)
openalex publication_date 2025/09/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Interlayer sliding degrees of freedom often determine the physical properties of two-dimensional (2D) materials. In graphene, for instance, the metastable rhombohedral stacking arrangement hosts correlated and topological electronic phases, which are absent in conventional Bernal stacking. Here, we demonstrate a sliding-induced first-order structural phase transition between Bernal and rhombohedral tetralayer graphene driven by gate voltages. Through transport measurement, we observe bistable switching between a Bernal-dominant state and a rhombohedral-Bernal mixed state across a wide space of the gate-voltage phase diagram. The structural phase transition results in nonvolatile switching between a paramagnet and a ferromagnet accompanied by the anomalous Hall effect. The sign reversal of the anomalous Hall effect under opposite displacement fields suggests that it may originate from domain boundaries between the Bernal and rhombohedral regions. Our discovery paves the way for on-demand toggling of quantum phases based on the sliding phase transition of 2D materials and offers a playground to explore unconventional physics at the stacking domain boundaries.