2025/08/10 by Kim, Soyun, Yun, Jo Hyun, Choe, Junsik +8
#FOS: Physical sciences #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics (cond-mat.mes-hall) #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.07187
We demonstrate electrically switchable, non-volatile dipoles in graphene/thin hBN/α-RuCl3 heterostructures, stabilized purely by interfacial charge transfer across an atomically thin dielectric barrier. This mechanism requires no sliding or twisting to explicitly break inversion symmetry and produces robust ferroelectric-like hysteresis loops that emerge prominently near 30~K. Systematic measurements under strong in-plane and out-of-plane magnetic fields reveal negligible effects on the hysteresis characteristics, confirming that the primary mechanism driving the dipole switching is electrostatic. Our findings establish a distinct and robust route to electrically tunable ferroelectric phenomena in van der Waals heterostructures, opening opportunities to explore the interplay between interfacial charge transfer and temperature-tuned barrier crossing of dipole states at the atomic scale.