Abstract
Advanced Energy Materials 2020, , 2001726
The Concept of Negative Capacitance in Ionically Conductive Van der Waals Ferroelectrics
Neumayer SM, Tao L, O'Hara A, Susner MA, McGuire MA, Maksymovych P, Pantelides ST, Balke N
Negative capacitance (NC) provides a path to overcome the Boltzmann limit that dictates operating voltages in transistors and therefore may open up a path to the challenging proposition of lowering energy consumption and waste heat in nanoelectronic integrated circuits. Typically, NC effects in ferroelectric materials are based on either stabilizing a zero-polarization state or slowing down ferroelectric switching in order to access NC regimes of the free-energy distribution. Here, a fundamentally different mechanism for NC, based on CuInP2S6 (CIPS), a van der Waals layered ferrielectric is demonstrated. Using density functional theory and piezoresponse force microscopy, it is shown that an unusual combination of high Cu-ion mobility and its crucial role in determining polarization magnitude and orientation leads to a negative slope of the polarization versus the electric field, dP/dE < 0, which is a requirement for NC. This mechanism for NC is likely to occur in a wide class of materials, offering new possibilities for NC-based devices. The nanoscale demonstration of this mechanism can be extended to the device-level by increasing the regions of homogeneous polarization and polarization switching, for example, through Q3 strain engineering and carefully selected electric field pulses.