Tomographic imaging discovered a new antipolar phase in van der Waals layered CuInP2S6. This discovery provides insights into developing novel ferroic states, e. g. antiferroelectrics (AFE) for efficient and neuromorphic computing.
A new surface phase with electromechanical properties consistent with AFE is discovered in bulk layered ferroelectric CuInP2S6. Tomographic piezoresponse force microscopy reveals control of the net polarization in preferred configurations consistent with density functional theory (DFT) calculations. AFE phases have been previously predicted with DFT only for the few-layer regime but not for bulk crystals. Transition between AFE and +P/-P states stores/ releases a high amount of energy and enables ternary information encoding.
