Visible-Photo-Assisted Phase Switching of Antiferroelectric-to-Ferroelectric Orders in an I -Intercalated 2D Perovskite.

Antiferroelectric (AFE) has emerged as a promising branch of electroactive materials, due to intriguing physical attributes stemming from the electric field-induced antipolar-to-polar phase transformation. However, the requirement of extremely high electric field strength to switch adjacent sublattice polarization poses great challenges for exploiting new molecular AFE system. Although photoirradiation is striking as a noncontact and nondestructive manipulation tool to optimize physical properties, optical control of antiferroelectricity still remains unexplored. Here, by adopting light-sensitive I anion into 2D perovskite family, we design a new I -intercalated molecular AFE of (t-ACH)EAPbI(I) ⋅ ((HO)(HO)) (1, t-ACH=trans-4-aminomethyl-1-cyclohexanecarboxylate, EA=ethylammonium). The I -intercalating gives an ultra-narrow band gap of 1.65 eV with strong absorption. In term of AFE structure, the anti-parallel alignment of electric dipoles results in a large spontaneous polarization of 4.3 μC/cm. Strikingly, 1 merely shows AFE behaviour in the dark even under ultrahigh voltage, while the field-induced ferroelectric state can be facilely obtained upon visible illumination. Such unprecedented visible-photo-assisted phase switching ascribes to the incorporation of photoactive I anions that reduces AFE-to-ferroelectric switching barrier. This pioneering work on the photo-assisting transformation of ferroic orders paves a way to develop future photoactive materials with potential applications.