□ The research team led by Professor Youngwook Kim from the Department of Physics and Chemistry, DGIST (President Kunwoo Lee), in collaboration with the research team of Professor Gil Young Cho at KAIST, announced the discovery of a new memory principle that enables information to be written and erased electrically by stacking ultrathin materials, such as graphene, in a sandwich-like structure. This research achievement is expected to contribute to the development of ultralow-power electronic devices, which consume minimal electricity, as well as components for next-generation quantum computers.
□ The semiconductor components of smartphones or computers, which we use every day, must also be slimmed drastically to make the devices thinner and lighter. However, the conventional “ferroelectric” materials used for information storage has limitations: their performance degrades sharply as thickness decreases, and they often require complex processes. Therefore, research has been actively conducted on new approaches that can realize memory properties (ferroelectricity) in ultrathin materials without using traditional ferroelectric materials.
□ The research team has resolved this issue through a counterintuitive approach that artificially induces ferroelectricity by combining non-ferroelectric materials. They devised a breakthrough structure in which an ultrathin insulating layer (hBN) is inserted like a sandwich between “graphene”—often called a dream material—and “α-RuCl₃.”The team confirmed that, remarkably, charges at the interface spontaneously rearrange in this structure, giving rise to “electric dipoles” that can store information much like a ferroelectric material, and information can be recorded and erased electrically, as if turning a switch on and off.
□ The operation of the device developed by the research team was most stable at around −243°C (30 K), and it exhibited outstanding “non-volatility,” retaining stored information for more than five months even with the power turned off. In addition, this phenomenon can be controlled solely through electrical interactions and is unaffected by the strength or orientation of external magnets (magnetic fields), making it significantly more stable and efficient than conventional approaches. This outcome demonstrates that ferroelectricity can be realized through simple stacking alone, without any structural deformation.
□“This study is significant in that it has discovered a new physical property that enables electrical control simply by stacking materials, without any artificial structural deformation,” stated Professor Youngwook Kim. “Looking ahead, we expect this technology to accelerate the development of memory devices for quantum computers operating at ultralow temperatures or next-generation ultralow-power semiconductors.”
□ The study was conducted with Dr. Soyeun Kim from the Department of Physics and Chemistry, DGIST, as the first author, in collaboration with the research group led by Professor Gil Young Cho at KAIST. The findings were published in the international journal Nature Communications on January 6, 2026, and the research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea and the Institute for Basic Science.
