A team of researchers tested this idea using titanium dioxide (TiO₂), and what they found next was totally unexpected. The ferroelectric phase persisted down to just one nanometer, roughly twice the size of a TiO₂ unit cell. This matters because ferroelectric materials can reverse their polarization with an external electric field and can operate at relatively low voltages, making them attractive for energy-efficient memory and logic. Instead of shrinking an existing ferroelectric, they asked whether a normally non-ferroelectric material could become ferroelectric when made sufficiently thin. The lattice distortion became stronger as the films grew thinner, and the ferroelectric phase survived at just one nanometer.