Nature Communications

2D ferroelectric narrow-bandgap semiconductor Wurtzite’ type α-In2Se3 and its silicon-compatible growth

2025-08-09

2D van der Waals ferroelectrics, particularly α -In 2 Se 3 , have emerged as an attractive building block for next-generation information storage technologies due to their moderate band gap and robust ferroelectricity stabilized by dipole locking. α -In 2 Se 3 can adopt either the distorted zincblende or wurtzite structures; however, the wurtzite phase has yet to be experimentally validated, and its large-scale synthesis poses significant challenges. Here, we report an in-situ transport growth of centimeter-scale wurtzite type α -In 2 Se 3 films directly on SiO 2 substrates using a process combining pulsed laser deposition and chemical vapor deposition. We demonstrate that it is a narrow bandgap ferroelectric semiconductor, featuring a Curie temperature exceeding 620 K, a tunable bandgap (0.8–1.6 eV) modulated by charged domain walls, and a large optical absorption coefficient of 1.3 × 10 6 /cm. Moreover, light absorption promotes the dynamic conductance range, linearity, and symmetry of the synapse devices, leading to a high recognition accuracy of 92.3% in a supervised pattern classification task for neuromorphic computing. Our findings demonstrate a ferroelectric polymorphism of In 2 Se 3 , highlighting its potential in ferroelectric synapses for neuromorphic computing.

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DOI https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-62822-7