The central innovation lies in the transistor itself. Molybdenum disulfide, a two-dimensional semiconducting material just a few atoms thick, forms the conducting channel of the device. Because the material is so thin, its electronic properties can be controlled with exceptional precision by electric fields applied from above and below. The researchers exploited this by constructing a dual-gate architecture: one gate tunes the channel’s conductivity in the conventional manner, while the second gate is made of a ferroelectric material whose polarization state can be flipped and retained without continuous power. This ferroelectric layer effectively gives the transistor a form of nonvolatile memory, allowing it to remember its configuration even when the device is switched off.

That combination of tunability and memory is what enables the reconfigurability at the heart of the new architecture. By adjusting the voltages applied to the two gates, the researchers can steer a single transistor between fundamentally different modes of operation. In one configuration, the device behaves as a spiking neuron, integrating incoming electrical pulses and firing an output spike only when the accumulated input crosses a threshold, mirroring the leaky integrate-and-fire dynamics of biological neurons. In another configuration, the same physical device operates as a logic transistor within a standard digital circuit, performing the deterministic switching operations on which conventional computing relies. No rewiring, no fabrication changes, and no additional components are needed to move between these modes; only gate voltages change.

Spiking neural networks represent a fundamentally different approach to computation compared with the artificial neural networks that dominate today’s AI landscape. Rather than exchanging continuous numerical values, spiking networks communicate through discrete electrical pulses, or spikes, much like the neurons in a biological brain. Information is encoded in the timing and frequency of these spikes, which allows the network to remain largely idle between events and consume power only when meaningful signals arrive. This event-driven behavior is the reason the human brain, running on roughly twenty watts, can outperform supercomputers on many perceptual tasks. Hardware that natively supports spiking dynamics could therefore deliver dramatic improvements in energy efficiency, particularly for edge applications such as wearable sensors, medical implants, and autonomous systems where power budgets are unforgiving.

Until now, building spiking hardware has typically required dedicated devices such as memristors, phase-change memory cells, or specialized neuron circuits, each fabricated separately from the logic elements of the surrounding system. That separation imposes penalties in chip area, fabrication complexity, and the energy cost of moving signals between distinct regions of a circuit. The new work collapses that distinction. Because every transistor in the architecture is potentially reconfigurable, a chip could dynamically allocate its resources, dedicating more of its fabric to spiking computation during sensory processing tasks and reprogramming sections for deterministic logic when precise arithmetic is required. This fluid boundary between neural and digital operation is what the researchers describe as a neural-network-in-logic architecture.

The ferroelectric gating mechanism deserves particular attention for what it implies about energy efficiency. Conventional transistor-based neuron circuits often need capacitors or feedback loops to accumulate charge and emulate neuronal integration, and they lose their state when power is removed. A ferroelectric gate, by contrast, stores its polarization intrinsically. In the spiking mode, the ferroelectric layer can integrate the effect of repeated input pulses by gradually shifting its polarization, acting as an intrinsic memory of recent activity. The result is a neuron whose history is physically encoded in the material itself, reducing the overhead associated with maintaining state and enabling genuinely event-driven operation. Because molybdenum disulfide channels are atomically thin, the electrostatic coupling between the ferroelectric polarization and the channel is unusually strong, which the researchers identify as essential to achieving reliable switching behavior at practical operating voltages.

Molybdenum disulfide has emerged as one of the most promising two-dimensional semiconductors for post-silicon electronics. Unlike graphene, which lacks a natural band gap, molybdenum disulfide is a semiconductor with favorable transport properties even in monolayer form. Its inert, dangling-bond-free surface means that interfaces with gate dielectrics are remarkably clean, reducing the scattering and variability that plague conventional scaled transistors. These properties have made it a favorite candidate for ultimately scaled electronics, and the new study demonstrates that the same material platform can serve functions far beyond simple switching. The combination of a two-dimensional channel with a ferroelectric gate effectively unites two of the most active research directions in device engineering into a single, multifunctional structure.

The demonstration of logic functionality alongside spiking behavior is more than a technical curiosity. Real-world intelligent systems rarely consist of neural computation alone; they require interfacing with digital peripherals, preprocessing data, and executing control decisions that demand exact, repeatable outcomes. A processor that can host both computational styles on a shared, reconfigurable fabric could avoid the energy and latency costs of shuttling data between separate neural and digital dies. The researchers show that individual transistors and small circuits built from them can be toggled between spiking and logic roles and reprogrammed repeatedly, establishing the foundation for architectures in which the boundary between inference and computation is drawn in software rather than silicon.

Significant engineering challenges remain before such devices could appear in commercial products. Ferroelectric materials integrated with two-dimensional semiconductors are still maturing, and questions of endurance, uniformity across large wafers, and long-term stability will need to be answered at scale. Fabricating high-quality molybdenum disulfide over the large areas required for industrial manufacturing remains an active area of research, although recent progress in wafer-scale growth of two-dimensional materials suggests the obstacle is one of engineering refinement rather than fundamental physics. The operating characteristics of the spiking elements, including threshold variability and response speed, will also need to be characterized and optimized for large networks.

Nevertheless, the significance of the demonstration is difficult to overstate. The semiconductor industry has spent decades pursuing ever finer transistors, but the diminishing returns of miniaturization have pushed researchers toward devices that do more with each switching element. A transistor that can remember, spike, and compute, reconfigurable on demand, represents exactly the kind of functional diversification that next-generation computing may require. If the reconfigurable molybdenum disulfide dual-gate architecture can be scaled to arrays of thousands or millions of devices, it could pave the way toward chips that learn, adapt, and compute within a single unified fabric, blurring the line between the machines we program and the brains that inspire them. For now, the work stands as a striking proof of concept that the boundary between neural and conventional computing can be drawn, and redrawn, atom by atom.

Subject of Research: Reconfigurable molybdenum disulfide dual-gate transistors with ferroelectric gating for spiking neural network-in-logic hardware architectures

Article Title: A spiking neural network-in-logic architecture based on reconfigurable molybdenum disulfide dual-gate transistors with ferroelectric gating

Article References: Li, L., Zheng, H., Li, C., Xiang, H., Wang, J., Zheng, F., Chen, M., Chien, Y.-C., Gao, J., Huo, J., Chi, D., Fong, X., Wan, Y., Meng, W., Li, L.-J., & Ang, K.-W. (2026). A spiking neural network-in-logic architecture based on reconfigurable molybdenum disulfide dual-gate transistors with ferroelectric gating. Nature Electronics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-026-01706-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41928-026-01706-0

Keywords: spiking neural networks, molybdenum disulfide, ferroelectric gating, dual-gate transistors, neuromorphic computing, two-dimensional materials, reconfigurable logic, Nature Electronics, energy-efficient computing, post-silicon electronics, neural-network-in-logic, nonvolatile memory

The work, published in Nature Materials, focuses on freestanding membranes of BaTiO3, one of the most intensively studied ferroelectric compounds in existence. Ferroelectrics possess a spontaneous electric polarization that can be reoriented between stable states by an external field, which is precisely why they dominate applications ranging from capacitors to nonvolatile memories and piezoelectric transducers. What makes BaTiO3 particularly attractive for the new experiment is that its polar state is intimately tied to a structural distortion of the crystal lattice: below its Curie temperature, the titanium ions shift off-center within their oxygen cages, breaking the symmetry of the lattice and creating the electrical polarization. Because phonons are themselves collective motions of this lattice, any manipulation of the polarization necessarily reshapes the entire vibrational landscape, including the subtle rotational motions that define chiral phonons.

The particular vibration studied here belongs to what the authors describe as the g-wave sector of the lattice dynamics, referring to a high-frequency branch of phonons whose atoms execute circular, swirling trajectories. In such modes, two conjugate forms of the vibration exist, left-handed and right-handed, which are mirror images of one another but otherwise identical in energy. In an unperturbed crystal that lacks a handedness of its own, these two forms are degenerate, meaning they coexist in equal measure and no net chirality is expressed. To observe or use chiral phonons, one therefore needs a way to break this degeneracy, to make the crystal prefer one rotational sense over the other, and, crucially, to switch that preference on demand. The new study demonstrates that in BaTiO3 membranes, the ferroelectric polarization does exactly this job, acting as an internal, field-tunable chiral axis for the lattice.

Demonstrating such control experimentally is far from trivial. Chiral phonons vibrate at frequencies of terahertz order, far too fast for conventional spectroscopies to resolve directly, and their signatures are embedded deep within the vibrational spectrum of the crystal. The technique of choice in this study was circularly dichroic resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, an advanced synchrotron method that combines the momentum-resolving power of inelastic X-ray scattering with the chiral sensitivity of circularly polarized light. In this scheme, an incoming X-ray photon tuned to an absorption edge of a constituent atom transfers a well-defined portion of its energy and momentum to the lattice, exciting a specific phonon, and the scattered photon is analyzed for its energy loss. By measuring how efficiently the phonon is excited when the X-ray beam’s circular polarization is reversed, researchers can determine the phonon’s own handedness with remarkable selectivity, effectively interrogating the crystal with one rotating probe to detect rotating excitations.

Using this approach on their BaTiO3 membranes, the researchers recorded phonon spectra with circularly polarized X-rays tuned to the titanium absorption edge and observed a clear dichroic signal at the energy of the g-wave phonon. The sign of this signal, which encodes the phonon’s chirality, flipped when the ferroelectric polarization of the membrane was reversed by an applied electric field. This is the central experimental result: the handedness of the lattice vibration is not a fixed property of the material but a state that follows the polarization direction and can be rewritten at will. Because ferroelectric polarization is nonvolatile, retaining its orientation after the field is removed, the phonon chirality it selects is likewise nonvolatile, opening a conceptual pathway toward devices in which information is stored in the rotational sense of atomic motion rather than in charge, spin, or conventional polarization alone.

The physics underlying this switching can be understood through the lens of symmetry. In the ferroelectric phase of BaTiO3, the off-center displacement of the titanium ions lowers the crystal symmetry and establishes a polar axis, transforming the material from an achiral environment into one that distinguishes between clockwise and counterclockwise rotation along that axis. The g-wave phonon’s circular atomic trajectories then couple differently to this polar lattice depending on their handedness, lifting the degeneracy between the left- and right-handed forms and determining which one dominates the measured dichroic response. When the electric field reverses the polarization, the symmetry operation connecting the two states acts like a mirror that interchanges the two chiralities, and the phonon population follows. The experiment thus provides a direct, momentum-resolved picture of how a macroscopic order parameter in a ferroelectric governs the microscopic rotation of atoms, a connection that had been theorized but was extraordinarily difficult to verify until the advent of chiral-sensitive inelastic X-ray techniques.

The significance of the result extends well beyond barium titanate itself. Chiral phonons have been proposed as carriers of angular momentum that can be transferred to electron spins, as mediators of a phonon contribution to the Edelstein and inverse Edelstein effects, and as a route to phonon-controlled magnetism in so-called phonon-magnetic materials. They also underpin emerging proposals for chiral phononics, in which the handedness of vibrations serves as an information carrier immune to some of the noise and leakage channels that plague charge-based electronics. What all of these proposals require is an efficient, reversible, and preferably electrically driven mechanism for writing and erasing phonon chirality. The demonstration that a ferroelectric gate can fulfill this role in a technologically mature material suggests that such mechanisms are not exotic laboratory curiosities but achievable engineering primitives.

The choice of freestanding membranes as the sample geometry is also consequential. Thin, released membranes of complex oxides can sustain electric fields and strain states that are difficult to impose in bulk crystals, and their reduced thickness minimizes the absorption and scattering losses that complicate soft X-ray measurements. In the study, the membrane format allowed the researchers to apply the switching field while maintaining optical access for the resonant scattering experiment, and it is consistent with the broader trend of integrating oxide ferroelectrics into thin-film heterostructures for next-generation electronic devices. The combination of a classic ferroelectric, a state-of-the-art synchrotron probe, and device-relevant sample geometry gives the result an unusually direct line from fundamental symmetry physics to potential applications.

Looking forward, the findings raise a series of compelling questions. How fast can the phonon chirality follow the polarization during a switching event, and what transient chiral dynamics unfold in the intermediate states of a ferroelectric domain wall as it sweeps through the membrane? Can the same circularly dichroic scattering technique resolve the interaction between chiral phonons and other quasiparticles, such as magnons or excitons, in heterostructures that couple ferroelectric and magnetic orders? And can the electrically written chirality be read out by faster, more compact means, perhaps through chirality-dependent optical or transport responses, so that phonon-handedness memory could one day be integrated into practical circuitry? The present work does not answer all of these questions, but by establishing electric-field switching as an experimental reality, it converts many of them from speculation into concrete research programs.

For decades, ferroelectricity has been understood as the electric-field control of where atoms sit. This new result reframes that familiar story: in BaTiO3, the same field control extends to how atoms move, determining the rotational sense of their collective dance. The ability to write, erase, and read the chirality of a lattice vibration with a voltage transforms chiral phonons from a fascinating spectroscopic observation into a controllable degree of freedom of condensed matter. As synchrotron and free-electron laser facilities continue to sharpen the tools of chiral X-ray scattering, and as oxide membranes become ever more integrated into device architectures, the swirling, handed vibrations of crystals may soon find themselves at the heart of technologies that store data, process signals, and manipulate angular momentum in ways their discoverers never imagined.

Subject of Research: Electric-field control of chiral g-wave phonons in ferroelectric barium titanate membranes

Article Title: Electric-field switching of g-wave phonon chirality in ferroelectric BaTiO3

Article References: Grimes, M., Ueda, H., Allington, C. J., Romao, C. P., Kummer, K., Kaur, P., Wang, L.-S., Chang, Y.-W., Yang, J.-C., Huang, S.-W., & Staub, U. (2026). Electric-field switching of g-wave phonon chirality in ferroelectric BaTiO3. Nature Materials. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-026-02737-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41563-026-02737-w

Keywords: phonon chirality, ferroelectricity, BaTiO3, electric-field switching, resonant inelastic X-ray scattering, X-ray circular dichroism, chiral phonons, functional materials, lattice dynamics, nonvolatile memory, phononics, membranes