Tel Aviv University physicists build ultra-low-energy graphene switch from sliding layers

Physicists and chemists at Tel Aviv University described in March 2026 a new kind of nanoscale switch made from graphene, the one-atom-thick form of carbon, that can flip between two states using a tiny fraction of the energy needed by today's memory technologies. The study, published in Nature Nanotechnology, was supervised by Professor Moshe Ben-Shalom of the School of Physics and Astronomy and Professors Michael Urbakh and Oded Hod of the School of Chemistry, with experiments and calculations led by Dr. Nirmal Roy and Dr. Pengua Ying and with collaborators in Japan.

Graphite is made of stacked graphene sheets, and the way neighbouring sheets line up, known as the stacking order or polytype, changes the material's electronic properties. The team built islands only tens of nanometres wide in which a few graphene layers stay locked together, surrounded by an interface where layers slide past one another with almost no friction, a property called superlubricity. A small sideways force can then shift one layer relative to another and switch the island from one stacking arrangement to another. In an earlier preprint the group reported switching forces of only a few billionths of a newton.

The researchers found that once a switch is triggered it often completes on its own, and that neighbouring islands can be elastically coupled so that flipping one influences the next. That behaviour resembles the way connected units interact in logic circuits and in networks of neurons.

Because the state of each island is stored in the position of atoms rather than in electric charge, the approach could support memory elements and sensors that are both fast and extremely frugal with power. The team sees potential uses in so-called slidetronics and in neuromorphic computing, which tries to imitate the brain's efficiency.