Switchable and unswitchable bulk photovoltaic effect in two-dimensional interlayer-sliding ferroelectrics

Abstract

Spontaneous polarization and bulk photovoltaic effect (BPVE) are two concomitant physical properties in ferroelectric materials. The flipping of ferroelectric order usually accompanies with the switching of BPVE as both of them are reversed under the inversion symmetry. In this study, we report the distinctive BPVE characters in two-dimensional (2D) interlayer sliding ferroelectric materials featuring unswitchable in-plane BPVE (light-induced photocurrent in the xy plane) and switchable out-of-plane BPVE (light-induced polarization along the z-direction). Symmetry analysis within abstract bilayer crystal model and first-principles calculations validate these BPVE properties. It is because the positive and negative ferroelectric states caused by interlayer sliding are related by mirror symmetry which cannot flip all the BPVE tensor elements. This finding extends the understanding of the relationship between ferroelectricity and BPVE. On one hand, the switchable out-of-plane BPVE can be used to design switchable photoelectric devices. On the other hand, the in-plane BPVE is robust against the ferroelectric flipping, and the unswitchable character is beneficial to construct larger-scale photoelectric devices.

References in corpus (11)

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• Tailoring Bulk Photovoltaic Effects in Magnetic Sliding Ferroelectric Materials
• Emergent properties of van der Waals bilayers revealed by computational stacking
• Two-dimensional Topological Ferroelectric Metal with Giant Shift Current
• Ferroelectric metals in 1T/1T'-phase transition metal dichalcogenide MTe2 bilayers (M = Pt, Pd, and Ni)
• Shift current response in elemental two-dimensional ferroelectrics
• Interlayer electric multipoles induced by in-plane field from quantum geometric origins
• Quasi-one-dimensional sliding ferroelectricity in NbI${}_4$
• Ferroelectric Antiferromagnetic Lifting of Spin-Valley Degeneracy
• Nonlinear optical response in kagome lattice with inversion symmetry breaking