Organic Ferroelectric Materials and Applications aims to bring an up-to date account of the field with discussion of recent findings. This book presents an interdisciplinary resource for scientists from both academia and industry on the science and applications of molecular organic piezo- and ferroelectric materials. The book addresses the fundamental science of ferroelectric polymers, molecular crystals, supramolecular networks, and other key and emerging organic materials systems. It touches on important processing and characterization methods and provides an overview of current and emerging applications of organic piezoelectrics and ferroelectrics for electronics, sensors, energy harvesting, and biomedical technologies. Organic Ferroelectric Materials and Applications will be of special interest to those in academia or industry working in materials science, engineering, chemistry, and physics. - Provides an overview of key physical properties of the emerging piezoelectric and ferroelectric molecular and supramolecular systems - Discusses best practices of processing, patterning, and characterization methods and techniques - Addresses current and emerging applications for electronics, materials development, sensors, energy harvesting, and biomedical technologies

This book presents the basic physical properties, structure, fabrication methods and applications of ferroelectric materials. These are widely used in various devices, such as piezoelectric/electrostrictive transducers and actuators, pyroelectric infrared detectors, optical integrated circuits, optical data storage, display devices, etc. The ferroelectric materials described in this book include a relatively complete list of practical and promising ferroelectric single crystals, bulk ceramics and thin films. Included are perovskite-type, lithium niobate, tungsten-bronze-type, water-soluable crystals and other inorganic materials, as well as organic ferroelectrics (polymers, liquid crystals, and composites). Basic concepts, principles and methods for the physical property characteristics of ferroelectric materials are introduced in the first two chapters for those readers new to the subject of ferroelectricity. Not only professional researchers and engineers but also students and other readers who have limited physical knowledge and an interest in ferroelectrics, will welcome this book.

Provides a comprehensive overview of the emerging applications of ferroelectric materials in energy harvesting and storage Conventional ferroelectric materials are normally used in sensors and actuators, memory devices, and field effect transistors, etc. Recent progress in this area showed that ferroelectric materials can harvest energy from multiple sources including mechanical energy, thermal fluctuations, and light. This book gives a complete summary of the novel energy-related applications of ferroelectric materials?and reviews both the recent advances as well as the future perspectives in this field. Beginning with the fundamentals of ferroelectric materials, Ferroelectric Materials for Energy Applications offers in-depth chapter coverage of: piezoelectric energy generation; ferroelectric photovoltaics; organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites for solar energy conversion; ferroelectric ceramics and thin films in electric energy storage; ferroelectric polymer composites in electric energy storage; pyroelectric energy harvesting; ferroelectrics in electrocaloric cooling; ferroelectric in photocatalysis; and first-principles calculations on ferroelectrics for energy applications. -Covers a highly application-oriented subject with great potential for energy conversion and storage applications. -Focused toward a large, interdisciplinary group consisting of material scientists, solid state physicists, engineering scientists, and industrial researchers -Edited by the "father of integrated ferroelectrics" Ferroelectric Materials for Energy Applications is an excellent book for researchers working on ferroelectric materials and energy materials, as well as engineers looking to broaden their view of the field.

Ferroelectric materials have been and still are widely used in many applications, that have moved from sonar towards breakthrough technologies such as memories or optical devices. This book is a part of a four volume collection (covering material aspects, physical effects, characterization and modeling, and applications) and focuses on the application of ferroelectric devices to innovative systems. In particular, the use of these materials as varying capacitors, gyroscope, acoustics sensors and actuators, microgenerators and memory devices will be exposed, providing an up-to-date review of recent scientific findings and recent advances in the field of ferroelectric devices.

Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous crystalline polymers con­structed by metal sites and organic building blocks. Since the discovery of MOFs in the 1990s, they have received tremendous research attention for various applications due to their high surface area, controllable mor­phology, tunable chemical properties, and multifunctionalities, including MOFs as precursors and self-sacrificing templates for synthesizing metal oxides, heteroatom-doped carbons, metal-atoms encapsulated carbons, and others. Thus, awareness and knowledge about MOFs and their derived nanomaterials with conceptual understanding are essential for the advanced material community. This breakthrough new volume aims to explore down-to-earth applications in fields such as bio­medical, environmental, energy, and electronics. This book provides an overview of the structural and fundamental properties, synthesis strate­gies, and versatile applications of MOFs and their derived nanomaterials. It gives an updated and comprehensive account of the research in the field of MOFs and their derived nanomaterials. Whether as a reference for industry professionals and nanotechnologists or for use in the classroom for graduate and postgraduate students, faculty members, and research and development specialists working in the area of inorganic chemistry, materials science, and chemical engineering, this is a must-have for any library.

The field of ferroelectricity has greatly expanded and changed in recent times. In addition to classical organic and inorganic ferroelectrics, new fields and materials, unknown or inactive 20 to 40 years ago, have appeared. They are important for both basic science and applications, and show technological promise for novel multifunctional devices. New fields include multiferroic magnetoelectric systems, where spontaneous polarization and spontaneous magnetization are allowed to coexist; incommensurate ferroelectrics, where the periodicity of the order parameter is incommensurate to the periodicity of the underlying basic crystal lattice; ferroelectric liquid crystals; dipolar glasses; relaxor ferroelectrics; ferroelectric thin films; nanoferroelectrics. These new fields are not only of basic physical interest, but also of great technological importance, allowing the design of new memory devices, spintronic applications, and the design of electro-optic devices. They are also important for applications in acoustics, robotics, telecommunications and medicine. The book is primarily intended for material scientists working in research or industry. It is also intended for graduate and doctoral students and can be used as a textbook in graduate courses. Finally, it should be useful for anybody interested in following the developments in modern solid state physics.

The study of ferroelectricity is a branch of solid state physics which has shown rapid growth during the recent years. Ferroelectric materials exhibit unusual electric properties which make them useful in modern (opto)electronic technology, esp. display technology. Ferroelectric and antiferroelectric liquid crystals, including also various polymer forms, are the hottest research topic today in liquid crystals. The field is at the very beginning of industrial exploitation - a sensitive phase in which a good reference work is needed and will have a broad spectrum of readers both at universities and in industry.

Hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites (HOIPs) have attracted substantial interest due to their chemical variability, structural diversity and favorable physical properties the past decade. This materials class encompasses other important families such as formates, azides, dicyanamides, cyanides and dicyanometallates. The book summarizes the chemical variability and structural diversity of all known hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites subclasses including halides, azides, formates, dicyanamides, cyanides and dicyanometallates. It also presents a comprehensive account of their intriguing physical properties, including photovoltaic, optoelectronic, dielectric, magnetic, ferroelectric, ferroelastic and multiferroic properties. Moreover, the current challenges and future opportunities in this exciting field are also been discussed. This timely book shows the readers a complete landscape of hybrid organic-inorganic pervoskites and associated multifuctionalities.

This volume reviews the latest trends in organic optoelectronic materials. Each comprehensive chapter allows graduate students and newcomers to the field to grasp the basics, whilst also ensuring that they have the most up-to-date overview of the latest research. Topics include: organic conductors and semiconductors; conducting polymers and conjugated polymer semiconductors, as well as their applications in organic field-effect-transistors; organic light-emitting diodes; and organic photovoltaics and transparent conducting electrodes. The molecular structures, synthesis methods, physicochemical and optoelectronic properties of the organic optoelectronic materials are also introduced and described in detail. The authors also elucidate the structures and working mechanisms of organic optoelectronic devices and outline fundamental scientific problems and future research directions. This volume is invaluable to all those interested in organic optoelectronic materials.

Ferroelectric materials are known and valued for their multifunctionality arising from the possibility to perturb the remnant ferroelectric polarization by electric field, temperature and/or mechanical stimuli. While inorganic ferroelectrics dominate the current market, their organic counterparts may provide highly desired properties like eco-friendliness, easy processability and flexibility, concomitantly opening unique opportunities to combine multiple functionalities into a single compound that facilitates unprecedented device concepts and designs. Supramolecular organic ferroelectrics of columnar discotic type, that are the topic of this thesis, offer additional advantages related to their strong hierarchical self-assembly and easy tunability by molecular structure modifications, allowing optimization of ferroelectric characteristics and their hybridization with, e.g., semiconductivity. This not only leads to textbook ferroelectric materials that can be used as model systems to understand the general behaviour of ferroics, but also gives rise to previously unobserved effects stemming from the interplay of different functionalities. The core-shell structure of the molecules under the scope enables multiple pathways forrational design by molecular structure modification. This was firstly pursued via peripheral tail engineering on an archetypal self-assembling ferroelectric trialkylbenzene-1,3,5-tricarboxamide (BTA). We found that by shortening the alkyl chain length all the ferroelectric properties can be continuously tuned. In particular, changing the tail from C18H37 to C6H13causes an increase in depolarization activation energy (~0.8 eV to ~1.55 eV), coercive field(~25 V/?m to ~50 V/?m) and remnant polarization (~20 mC/m2 to ~60 mC/m2). The combination of the mentioned characteristics resulted in a record polarization retention time of close to 3 months at room temperature for capacitor devices of the material having the shortest alkyl chain – BTA-C6, which at the time of writing was one of the best results for liquid-crystalline ferroelectrics. Taking one step further, we experimentally demonstrated how introduction of branched-tailsubstituents results in materials with a wide operating temperature range and a data retention time of more than 10 years in thin-film solution-processed capacitor devices already atelevated temperatures with no measurable depolarization at room temperature. The observed differences between linear- and branched-tail compounds were analysed using density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. We concluded that morphological factors like improved packing quality and reduced disorder, rather than electrostatic interactions or intra/inter-columnar steric hindrance, underlay the superior properties of the branched-tailed BTAs. Synergistic effects upon blending of compounds with branched and linear sidechains were shown to further improve the materials’ characteristics. Exploiting the excellent ferroelectric performance and the well-defined nanostructure of BTAs, we experimentally determined the Preisach (hysteron) distribution of BTA and confronted it to the one obtained for the semi-crystalline P(VDF:TrFE). This allowed to elucidate how the broadening of the Preisach distribution relates to the materials’ morphology. We further connected the experimental Preisach distribution to the corresponding microscopic switching kinetics. We argue that the combination of the two underlays the macroscopic dispersive switching kinetics as commonly observed for practical ferroelectrics. These insights lead to guidelines for further advancement of ferroelectric materials both for conventional and multi-bit data storage applications. Although having strong differences in the Preisach distribution, BTA and P(VDF:TrFE) both demonstrate negative piezoelectricity – a rare anomalous phenomenon which is characteristic to two-phased materials and has never been observed in small-molecular ferroelectrics. We measured a pronounced negative piezoelectric effect in a whole family of BTAs and revealed its tunability by mesogenic tail substitution and structural disorder. While the large- and small-signal strain in highly ordered thin-film BTA capacitor devices are dominated by intrinsic contributions and originates from piezostriction, rising disorder introduces additional extrinsic factors that boost the large-signal d33 up to ?20 pm/V in short-tailed molecules. Interestingly, homologues with longer mesogenic tails show a large-signal electromechanical response that is dominated by the quadratic Maxwell strain with significant mechanical softening upon polarization switching, whereas the small-signal strain remains piezostrictive. Molecular dynamics and DFT calculations both predict a positive d33 for defect-free BTA stacks. Hence, the measured negative macroscopic d33 is attributed to the presence of structural defects that enable the dimensional effect to dominate the piezoelectric response of BTA thin films. The true multifunctionality of supramolecular discotics manifests when large semiconducting cores surrounded by field-switchable strongly polar moieties are introduced in the structure. We showed how the combination of switchable dipolar side groups and the semiconducting core of the newly synthetized C3-symmetric benzotristhiophene molecule (BTTTA) leads to an ordered columnar material showing continuous tunability from injection- to bulk-limited conductivity modulation. Both these resistive switching mechanisms may lead to the next-generation high-density non-volatile rewritable memory devices with high on/off ratios and non-destructive data readout – the element that has been desperately sought after to enablefully organic flexible electronics. Utbredd elektronisering och det högst aktuella fenomenet sakernas internet (Internet of Things) ställer höga krav på nästa generations elektroniska system. Produkterna ska vara lätta att framställa med miljövänliga metoder, låg kostnadsproduktion och skalbarhet (t. ex. tryckt elektronik), återvinningsbarhet eller biologisk nedbrytbarhet (gällande engångselektronik), mekanisk flexibilitet (formbara bärbara system), kemisk stabilitet, till och med biokompatibilitet (t. ex. implanterbara system) – dessa är bara några utmaningar som den kommande tekniken behöver övervinna. Organiska material kan åstadkomma alla dessa önskade egenskaper, samtidigt som man skapar unika möjligheter att kombinera flera funktionaliteter till en enda sammansättning som underlättar nydanande komponenter och design. Ferroelektriska material kännetecknas av pyroelektriska, piezoelektriska och dielektriska egenskaper. Denna mångsidighet möjliggör icke-flyktiga minnesenheter, temperatur- och taktila sensorer, olika transduktorer och manöverdon, som alla baseras på förändringar av den ferroelektriska restpolarisationen genom fält-, temperatur- och / eller mekaniska stimuleringar. Diskformade supramolekylära organiska ferroelektriska ämnen ger ytterligare fördelar tack vare deras modifierbara molekylstrukturer och starka hierarkiska självorganisation som staplar diskarna i kolumner. På detta sätt kan lättbearbetningsbara organiska ferroelektriska material med hög restpolarisering och extrem datalagring konstrueras molekylärt. På grund av deras väldefinierade nanostrukturer kan sådana material användas som modellsystem för att förstå det allmänna beteendet hos polykristallina ferroelektriska material. De uppvisar också ensällsynt negativ piezoelektricitet som är atypisk för små molekylära material och härrör från deras komplexa nanostruktur. Den verkliga multifunktionaliteten hos diskformade supramolekylära ämnen framträder när stora halvledande kärnor omgivna av starkt polära delar, som är växlingsbara via ett elektriskt fält, introduceras i strukturen. Oöverträffad resistiv omkoppling, inducerad av den asymmetriska laddningstransporten beroende på polarisationsriktningen med rekordhög datalagringstid, upptäcktes efter optimering av molekylstrukturen. Även en konceptuellt enklare resistiv omkopplingsmekanism bunden till en modulation av laddningsinjektionsbarriären genom gränssnittsdipolerna observerades. Båda dessa fenomen kan bidra till nästa generations icke-flyktiga överskrivningsbara minnesenheter med högdensitet, stora på av-förhållanden, och icke-destruktiv dataavläsning – vilket är kritiskt för att möjliggöra helt organisk flexibel elektronik.