Original title: Light-facilitated ferroelectric switching in wurtzite crystals
Ricardo Jiménez-Sánchez, Fernando Salazar, Miguel Cruz-Irisson, Riccardo Rurali +1 · September 2026
Certain memory materials, called wurtzite ferroelectrics, hold electrical data well and work with modern computer chips. However, flipping their stored data normally requires huge electric fields because of a steep internal energy barrier. To switch states, the material must pass from its polar wurtzite form through an unpolarized hexagonal form. Researchers used computer simulations to test a new way to lower this barrier without electric fields: shining light on the material. Testing lanthanum nitride, they found that light creates free electrical charges. These charges make the material act partially like a metal, which weakens the electrical forces locking the polar state in place. This sharply lowers the switching barrier, paving the way for faster memory that uses less energy.
Imagine pushing a heavy refrigerator across a kitchen floor. Every few feet there is a raised bump that you have to lift the fridge over, which takes a lot of effort. Now imagine that whenever you shine a flashlight on the floor, the bumps shrink to almost nothing, and the fridge slides across easily. In this paper, the fridge is the electric polarization in a crystal, and the bumps are the energy barriers that normally require a strong electric field to overcome. The light works like the flashlight, temporarily lowering those barriers so the polarization can switch with much less force.
Your phone, laptop, and wearable devices rely on non-volatile memory that keeps data even when powered off. Today's best options, like flash memory, are approaching their physical limits. Wurtzite ferroelectrics promise an upgrade, but they need too much voltage to switch—until now. This paper shows that using light to lower that voltage barrier could unlock smaller, faster, and cooler-running memory, directly affecting the speed and battery life of future electronics.
The findings are based entirely on computational simulations (first-principles calculations) for a specific material, LaN, and one additional polymorph. Experimental validation is not provided, and the practical feasibility of integrating light-based switching into chip architectures is not addressed. The abstract does not specify whether the effect persists at device-relevant temperatures or after many switching cycles.
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Light-facilitated ferroelectric switching in wurtzite crystals — Ricardo Jiménez-Sánchez, Fernando Salazar, Miguel Cruz-Irisson et al.
Abstract licence: CC0
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.