Nature Materials, DOI:10.1038/s41563-026-02609-3 (2026).
Haoran Qi1,2,3#, Guohao Xi4,#, Yuan–Biao Zhou5,#, Xinrong Liu1,2,3,#, Yifu Mao1,2,3,#, Jian Yang1,2,3, Jun Chen1,2,3, Kuojuei Hu1,2,3, Weiwei Gao2,3, Shuai Zhang1,2,3, Xiaoqin Gao1, Jianguo Wan1, Da–Wei Zhou6, Junhong An7, Xuefeng Wang8, De–Chuan Zhan6, Minhao Zhang1,2,3,*Cong Wang4,*, Wei Ji4, Yuan–Zhi Tan5,*, Su–Yuan Xie5, Fengqi Song1,2,3,*
Abstract:
Information units are progressively approaching the fundamental physical limits of the integration density, including in terms of extremely small sizes, multistates and probabilistic traversal. However, simultaneously encompassing all of these characteristics in a unit remains elusive. Here, via real-time in situ electrical monitoring, we clearly observed stochastic alterations of multiple conductance states in Sc2C2@C88. The true random bit sequence generated exhibited an autocorrelation function whose confidence interval fell within ±0.02, demonstrating high-quality randomness. The alterations of multiple conductance states are controllable, that is, whose probability distributions could traverse from “0” to “1”, enabling us to factorize 551 into its prime factors. Furthermore, we proposed a matrix-chain multiplication scheme and experimentally verified the multiplication of two 4 × 4 state-transition matrices with a small maximum error < 0.05. Combined with theoretical calculations, the stochastic but controllable multistates are probably attributed to the rich energy landscape, which could be stepwise changed by the electric field. Our findings reveal extremely small multi-level probabilistic bit for matrix multiplication, which pave the way for ultracompact intelligent electronic devices.
DOI:10.1038/s41563-026-02609-3
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