Coupled ferroelectricity and superconductivity in bilayer T d -MoTe 2

Achieving electrostatic control of quantum phases is at the frontier of condensed matter research. Recent investigations have revealed superconductivity tunable by electrostatic doping in twisted graphene heterostructures and in two-dimensional semimetals such as WTe 2 (refs. 1 – 5 ). Some of these systems have a polar crystal structure that gives rise to ferroelectricity, in which the interlayer polarization exhibits bistability driven by external electric fields 6 – 8 . Here we show that bilayer T d -MoTe 2 simultaneously exhibits ferroelectric switching and superconductivity. Notably, a field-driven, first-order superconductor-to-normal transition is observed at its ferroelectric transition. Bilayer T d -MoTe 2 also has a maximum in its superconducting transition temperature ( T c ) as a function of carrier density and temperature, allowing independent control of the superconducting state as a function of both doping and polarization. We find that the maximum T c is concomitant with compensated electron and hole carrier densities and vanishes when one of the Fermi pockets disappears with doping. We argue that this unusual polarization-sensitive two-dimensional superconductor is driven by an interband pairing interaction associated with nearly nested electron and hole Fermi pockets.