Chinese Scientists Achieve Atomic Slip That Switches Resistance Ten-Million-Fold

This matters less as a device milestone than as a materials-engineering one: the team appears to have decoupled the on/off ratio from the wear problem that has dogged sliding ferroelectric tunnel junctions, by controlling slip at the van der Waals interface rather than in the bulk. The immediate audience is the neuromorphic and low-power memory research community, where resistance-switching ratios of this magnitude are the long-sought ingredient. Whether the effect survives repeated cycling and can be reproduced outside a laboratory interface is the open question.