Researchers showed that hafnium oxide surprisingly exhibits enhanced ferroelectricity (reversible electric polarization) as it gets thinner. The work shifts the focus of ferroelectric studies from more complex, problematic compounds to a simpler class of materials and opens the door to novel ultrasmall, energy-efficient electronics. Read more »
Anomalous Orbital Structure in Two-Dimensional Materials
Researchers explored how structural distortions of the atomic lattice influence exotic electronic states in two-dimensional transition-metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). Polarization-dependent spectroscopy revealed an unexpectedly large crystal-field splitting of the valence electron states, a result of strong hybridization in metal–chalcogen orbitals. Read more »
A New Way to Tune Emergent Magnetism
Perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA)—where magnetic moments in a thin film preferentially point out of the plane of the film—is an emergent phenomenon of both fundamental and technological interest. A combination of x-ray techniques demonstrate how to tune PMA in transition-metal oxide multilayers. Read more » 
