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The authors investigated the effects of hydrostatic compression on polarization in parallel-stacked bilayer boron nitride—a prototypical sliding ferroelectric—using an adjacent graphene sheet as a sensitive local electrometer. Contrary to conventional displacive ferroelectrics where pressure suppresses ionic dipoles, hydrostatic compression up to 1.66 GPa induced a near-linear 80% enhancement in ferroelectric polarization and interlayer potential. This anomalous behavior confirms that stacking-mediated interlayer charge transfer can be mechanically amplified, establishing a viable route to boost state stability in atomically thin memory elements.
While hydrostatic pressure routinely degrades polarization in conventional ferroelectrics, squeezing bilayer boron nitride actually amplifies its switchable polarization by 80%.
Hydrostatic pressure commonly suppresses polarization in conventional displacive ferroelectrics by weakening the off-center ionic distortion. Sliding ferroelectrics may provide a contrasting case because their polarization arises from stacking-dependent interlayer charge transfer rather than intra-unit-cell ionic displacement. Here, hydrostatic pressure is shown to enhance, rather than suppress, the polarization of parallel-stacked bilayer boron nitride, a prototypical sliding ferroelectric. A graphene layer placed on top of a ferroelectric boron nitride bilayer is used for sensing the evolution of polarization under pressure. The pressure enhances both the interlayer potential and the ferroelectric polarization, with the latter increasing approximately linearly by 80% up to 1.66GPa. These results establish hydrostatic compression as a tuning parameter for sliding-ferroelectric polarization, with potential implications for ultrathin slidetronic memory devices.