Spin-orbit coupling is increasingly seen as a rich source of novel phenomena, as shown by the recent excitement around topological insulators and Rashba effects. We here show that the addition of ferroelectric degrees of freedom to a semiconductor featuring topologically nontrivial properties, such as SnTe, merges the intriguing field of spin-orbit-driven physics with nonvolatile functionalities appealing for spintronics. By using a variety of modeling techniques, we show that a strikingly rich sequence of phases can be induced in SnTe, when going from a room-temperature cubic phase to a low-temperature ferroelectric structure, ranging from a topological crystalline insulator to a time-reversal-invariant Z(2) topological insulator to a ferroelectric Rashba semiconductor, exhibiting a huge electrically controllable Rashba effect in the bulk band structure.
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