Abstract
The rapid progress of artificial intelligence has exposed the inherent limitations of the conventional chip technology, particularly the high energy-consumption, driving the emergence of neuromorphic chips and ionics. Using K+ ion-filled graphene channels, we investigate the mechanism underlying the graphene-based ion transistors by ab initio molecular dynamics simulations. Here we show that graphene electrons enable long-range correlation of confined ions, which provides a basis for the sensitive responses of transistors to the channel ion density (as modulated by a gate voltage). The ON/OFF switching effect specifically results from the competition between π-π stacking and cation-π interaction in the channels with different ion-filling densities. The nonlinear increasing of transport efficiency (i.e., signal amplification effect) is due to the ion density-depended collective oscillation of channel-confined ions. Additionally, resonance between channel-outside and channel-confined ions triggers rapid ion dehydration, enabling the transistor’s ultrahigh ion diffusivity. These atomic-level insights as a design principle for the ultralow energy-consumption neuro-morphic chips.
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Data availability
The processed numerical source data required to regenerate all main figures (Figs. 1–5) are available in the Materials Cloud Archive (https://doi.org/10.24435/materialscloud:fd-te) without access restrictions. The experimental ion transport data used for comparison were extracted from Refs. 10,11,12 and. 59,60,61,62,63
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Acknowledgements
We thank very much for the fruitful discussions with Drs. Jincheng Yue, Xingyue Wang and Siqin Fan. This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2021YFA1200404, B.S.) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (T2394532, B.S.; T22410002, B.S.). The numerical computations were performed on the Hefei Advanced Computing Center.
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B.S. and L.J. conceived the study. B.S. designed the simulations and calculations, and J.Z. performed the simulations and calculations. All authors analyzed the results. B.S., L.J. and J.Z. wrote the manuscript.
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Zhao, J., Song, B. & Jiang, L. Quantum correlation of channel-confined ions in graphene-based transistors for energy-efficient neuromorphic chips. Commun Mater (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43246-026-01082-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43246-026-01082-4
