Journal of the American Chemical Society
Journal of the American Chemical Society
5 years ago

Ferroelectric Polarization and Second Harmonic Generation in Supramolecular Cocrystals with Two Axes of Charge-Transfer

Ferroelectric Polarization and Second Harmonic Generation in Supramolecular Cocrystals with Two Axes of Charge-Transfer
Dennis Cao, Alok S. Tayi, Laszlo Frazer, Ashwin Narayanan, J. Fraser Stoddart, Samuel I. Stupp, John B. Ketterson, Andrew C.-H. Sue, Anthea K. Blackburn
Ferroelectricity in organic materials remains a subject of great interest, given its potential impact as lightweight information storage media. Here we report supramolecular charge-transfer cocrystals formed by electron acceptor and donor molecules that exhibit ferroelectric behavior along two distinct crystallographic axes. The solid-state superstructure of the cocrystals reveals that a 2:1 ratio of acceptor to donor molecules assemble into nearly orthogonal mixed stacks in which the molecules are positioned for charge-transfer in face-to-face and edge-to-face orientations, held together by an extended hydrogen-bonding network. Polarization hysteresis was observed along the face-to-face and edge-to-face axes at room temperature. The noncentrosymmetric nature of the cocrystals, required to observe ferroelectric behavior, is demonstrated using second harmonic generation measurements. This finding suggests the possibility of designing supramolecular arrays in which organic molecules support multidimensional information storage.

Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/jacs.7b02279

DOI: 10.1021/jacs.7b02279

You might also like
Discover & Discuss Important Research

Keeping up-to-date with research can feel impossible, with papers being published faster than you'll ever be able to read them. That's where Researcher comes in: we're simplifying discovery and making important discussions happen. With over 19,000 sources, including peer-reviewed journals, preprints, blogs, universities, podcasts and Live events across 10 research areas, you'll never miss what's important to you. It's like social media, but better. Oh, and we should mention - it's free.

  • Download from Google Play
  • Download from App Store
  • Download from AppInChina

Researcher displays publicly available abstracts and doesn’t host any full article content. If the content is open access, we will direct clicks from the abstracts to the publisher website and display the PDF copy on our platform. Clicks to view the full text will be directed to the publisher website, where only users with subscriptions or access through their institution are able to view the full article.