Nanosecond Ferroelectric Switching of Intralayer Excitons in Bilayer 3R-MoS2 through Coulomb Engineering

High-speed, non-volatile tunability is critical for advancing reconfigurable photonic devices used in neuromorphic information processing, sensing, and communication. Despite significant progress in developing phase change and ferroelectric materials, achieving highly efficient, reversible, rapid switching of optical properties has remained a challenge. Recently, sliding ferroelectricity has been discovered in 2D semiconductors, which also host strong excitonic effects. Here, we demonstrate that these materials enable nanosecond ferroelectric switching in the complex refractive index, largely impacting their linear optical responses. The maximum index modulation reaches about 4, resulting in a relative reflectance change exceeding 85%. Both on and off switching occurs within 2.5 nanoseconds, with switching energy at femtojoule levels. The switching mechanism is driven by tuning the excitonic peak splitting of a rhombohedral molybdenum disulfide bilayer in an engineered Coulomb screening environment. This new switching mechanism establishes a new direction for developing high-speed, non-volatile optical memories and highly efficient, compact reconfigurable photonic devices. Additionally, the demonstrated imaging technique offers a rapid method to characterize domains and domain walls in 2D semiconductors with rhombohedral stacking.