Ferroelectric-programmed photonic computing in monolayer WS₂

Photonic computing has the potential to significantly improve energy efficiency and data processing speed beyond that of von Neumann architecture. Although various optical processing techniques have been developed during recent two decades, the photonic manipulation is still a big challenging due to the bosonic nature of photons. Herein, we propose a ferroelectric field-controlled photonic computing based on the heterostructure of ferroelectric/van der Waals semiconductor. The strong and tunable electrostatic coupling of ferroelectric (PMN-PT) with monolayer WS2 results in a multi-level (2(4) bits) photoluminescence (PL) output. Furthermore, combining device modeling with experiments, we find that the multi-level PL output is because of the regulation of ferroelectric polarization on the net recombination rate of WS2. The ferroelectric field-controlled multi-level PL output enables us to design an optical arithmetic operation in the PMN-PT/WS2 heterostructure, which provides an attractive solution for photonic information computing.