More than 130 scientists took part in the 2026 edition of the 37th annual workshop on Fundamental Physics of Ferroelectric (https://www.materialsbydesign.org/ferro2026), in Tours, France from 2nd-5th February. 58 oral and 56 poster presentations covered a wide range on the physics of ferroelectricity and related phenomenon, with both experimental and theoretical approaches.

The hafnia community was well represented with a section highlighted by the invited talk from Alireza Kashir (Ferroelectric Memory GmbH) who presented “20 Years of Ferroelectric Hafnium Oxide: A Review of its Physics and an Outlook for Advanced Memory”. This provided a compelte review on the status of hafnia-based memory devices and their perspectives. Interestingly, several theory-related talks were focusing on hafnia highlighting the still urgent need to better understand switching and phase stability in hafnia from a theory perspective. Mainly, the most important presentations were presented from Ronald Cohen (Carnegie Institution for Science) presented “Pathologies of the polarization lattice: Switching in Hafnia”, Claudio Cazorla (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya) “Finite-Temperature Phase Competition in Bulk HfO2 from First-Principles Anharmonic Free-Energy Calculations” and Binayak Mukherjee (University of Liege) “The Polarization of Hafnia Ferroelectrics is Not a Bulk Property”.

Ferro4EdgeAI was well represented by the LENSIS lab (https://www.lensislab.com/) by Somnath Kale and Tom Iung with one oral and poster presentation. Somnath presented his work (oral) entitled “Multilevel Polarization Switching in Ferroelectric Hafnia Thin Films and Devices”. Tom Iung presented a poster about the already published work (J. Appl. Phys. 138, 134106 (2025)) within the framework of Ferro4EdgeAI on “Correct quantification of oxygen vacancies in ferroelectric hafnia”.