Recently, the research team led by Prof. Zejun Li from the School of Physics, SEU, in collaboration with Prof. Qian Chen, Associate Prof. Dongyang Wan, Associate Prof. Jun-Jie Zhang of SEU, and Prof. Jiong Lu from the National University of Singapore, achieved a significant breakthrough in understanding the scrolling behavior of two-dimensional (2D) materials. The team discovered, for the first time, a spontaneous rolling up phenomenon in polar 2D materials, revealing a novel mechanism driven intrinsically by out-of-plane electric polarization. This finding overturns the conventional understanding that external driving forces are necessary to induce scrolling. The research, titled “Near-100% spontaneous rolling up of polar van der Waals materials”, was published online in Nature Materials on October 13, 2025.
Rolling 2D materials into one-dimensional (1D) nanoscrolls introduces new degrees of freedom for manipulation, including curvature, chirality, and symmetry variations, establishing “Rolltronics”as an emerging frontier in 2D materials research. However, due to the inherent mechanical stiffness and symmetry constraints of 2D materials, traditional scrolling strategies require the design of external driving forces to overcome the strain energy caused by bending. These external-force-driven methods demand strict matching of interactions between the 2D material and the applied force, are typically isotropic, and are difficult to control precisely. Consequently, they often suffer from low yield, poor reproducibility, and random scrolling orientation and chiral angles.
To address these bottlenecks, the research team innovatively employed precise control over intercalant molecular size to modulate the out-of-plane electric polarization of polar 2D materials, achieving spontaneous scrolling behavior without any external driving force for the first time. This strategy leverages the competition between out-of-plane electric polarization and bending stiffness to enable controllable switching between 2D planar structures and 1D scrolled architectures within the same material system. The spontaneous scrolling induced by this method achieves nearly 100% yield and reproducibility, producing uniform nanoscroll morphologies with well-defined orientation and chiral angle. The resulting nanoscrolls exhibit a second harmonic generation (SHG) intensity approximately 100 times greater than their planar 2D counterparts and demonstrate broadband circularly polarized light detection capabilities. These features hold significant promise for future integrated circuit applications, including on-chip laser source conversion, quantum light sources, and all-optical signal processing. This research not only overcomes the limitations of traditional external-driving-force-induced scrolling but also establishes a new paradigm for the manipulation and functional development of 2D materials.
The School of Physics, SEU, is the primary affiliation for this work. Prof. Zejun Li, Prof. Qian Chen, Associate Prof. Dongyang Wan of SEU, and Prof. Jiong Lu of the National University of Singapore are the co-corresponding authors. Doctoral students Zhi Zhang and Yuwei Zhang, graduated master’s student Kangjun Lu, and Associate Prof. Jun-Jie Zhang from the School of Physics, SEU, are the co-first authors. This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province, the Key Laboratory of Quantum Materials and Information Devices (Ministry of Education) at Southeast University, and the Start-up Funds for New Faculty Members.
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-025-02357-w
