Interfacial ferroelectricity in rhombohedral-stacked bilayer transition metal dichalcogenides

van der Waals materials have greatly expanded our design space of heterostructures by allowing individual layers to be stacked at non-equilibrium configurations, for example via control of the twist angle. Such heterostructures not only combine characteristics of the individual building blocks, but can also exhibit physical properties absent in the parent compounds through interlayer interactions¹. Here we report on a new family of nanometre-thick, two-dimensional (2D) ferroelectric semiconductors, where the individual constituents are well-studied non-ferroelectric monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), namely WSe₂, MoSe₂, WS₂ and MoS₂. By stacking two identical monolayer TMDs in parallel, we obtain electrically switchable rhombohedral-stacking configurations, with out-of-plane polarization that is flipped by in-plane sliding motion. Fabricating nearly parallel-stacked bilayers enables the visualization of moiré ferroelectric domains as well as electric field-induced domain wall motion with piezoelectric force microscopy. Furthermore, by using a nearby graphene electronic sensor in a ferroelectric field transistor geometry, we quantify the ferroelectric built-in interlayer potential, in good agreement with first-principles calculations. The new semiconducting ferroelectric properties of these four new TMDs opens up the possibility of studying the interplay between ferroelectricity and their rich electric and optical properties^2–5.