Coexistence of ferroelectricity and superconductivity in a two-dimensional monolayer

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that hole-doping a 2D ferroelectric insulator like SnS can induce coexistence of ferroelectricity and superconductivity, offering a new pathway for designing multifunctional 2D materials.

Contribution

It introduces a general strategy to achieve coexistence of ferroelectricity and superconductivity in 2D materials through hole-doping, exemplified by SnS monolayer.

Findings

Hole-doping enhances polarization in SnS monolayer.

Doped SnS becomes a superconductor with Tc ~7 K.

Fermi surface nesting facilitates superconductivity.

Abstract

The coupling of ferroelectricity (FE) and superconductivity (SC) becomes the frontier of condensed matter research recently especially in the realm of two-dimensional (2D) materials. Identifying a general strategy to realize coexistence of FE and SC in a single material is extremely important for this active field, but quite challenging thus far. We show in this work that coexistence of robust FE and metallicity/SC can be realized by hole-doping a ferroelectric insulator which hosts antibonding highest valence bands (HVB). Using typical 2D ferroelecrtic SnS monolayer as a concrete example, we demonstrate that 0.30 hole/cell doping leads to enhancement of total polarization mainly ascribed to the increasing of polar displacement and ionic polarization. In addition, due to the strong Fermi surface nesting and prominent softening of out-of-plane acoustic phonon upon hole-doping, SnS can be turned into a single gap superconductor with an unexpectedly high transition temperature (Tc) of ~7 K, whereas the polar phonon mode gives negligible contribution to electron-phonon couplings. Our work provides general principle and realistic material for realizing metallic FE and superconducting FE, which paves the way for reversible and nonvolatile superconducting devices.