Recent research has broken the size limitation of traditional ferroelectric effects, providing experimental evidence and theoretical simulations to confirm that a structure with as few as 5,000 atoms can still exhibit solid-state ferroelectric effects.

The studies, by a joint team from Israel and China, are published in Nature Electronics and Nature Communications under the titles “Ferroelectricity in zero-dimensional” and “0D van der Waals interfacial sliding Ferroelectricity,” respectively.

The ferroelectric effect is a physical phenomenon discovered in the early 20th century by Joseph Valasek, and it provides an important technological route for achieving information storage. Traditional ferroelectric effects are subject to size limitations.