Gate-Tunable Electroresistance in a Sliding Ferroelectric Tunnel Junction

We fabricate and measure electrically gated tunnel junctions in which the insulating barrier is a sliding van der Waals ferroelectric made from parallel-stacked bilayer hexagonal boron nitride and the electrodes are single-layer graphene. Despite the nominally symmetric tunnel-junction structure, these devices can exhibit substantial electroresistance upon reversing the ferroelectric polarization. The magnitude and sign of tunneling electroresistance are tunable by bias and gate voltage. We show that this behavior can be understood within a simple tunneling model that takes into account the quantum capacitance of the graphene electrodes, so that the tunneling densities of states in the electrodes are separately modified as a function of bias and gate voltage.