Tunable electroresistance and electro-optic effects of transparent molecular ferroelectrics.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 28875167.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1126/sciadv.1701008 and PMC identifier 5576882.
- Licence recorded as CC BY-NC.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
Recent progress in molecular ferroelectrics (MOFEs) has been overshadowed by the lack of high-quality thin films for device integration. We report a water-based air-processable technique to prepare large-area MOFE thin films, controlled by supersaturation growth at the liquid-air interface under a temperature gradient and external water partial pressure. We used this technique to fabricate ImClO<sub>4</sub> thin films and found a large, tunable room temperature electroresistance: a 20-fold resistance variation upon polarization switching. The as-grown films are transparent and consist of a bamboo-like structure of (2,[Formula: see text],0) and (1,0,[Formula: see text]) structural variants of <i>R</i>3<i>m</i> symmetry with a reversible polarization of 6.7 μC/cm<sup>2</sup>. The resulting ferroelectric domain structure leads to a reversible electromechanical response of <i>d</i><sub>33</sub> = 38.8 pm/V. Polarization switching results in a change of the refractive index, <i>n</i>, of single domains, [Formula: see text]. The remarkable combination of these characteristics renders MOFEs a prime candidate material for new nanoelectronic devices. The information that we present in this work will open a new area of MOFE thin-film technologies.