title: The growth mechanism and ferroelectric domains of diisopropylammonium bromide films synthesized via 12-crown-4 addition at room temperature.
abstract: Diisopropylammonium bromide (DIPAB) has attracted great attention as a molecular ferroelectric with large spontaneous polarization and high Curie temperature. It is hard to grow the ferroelectric phase DIPAB because of the appearance of the non-ferroelectric phase DIPAB at room temperature. Here, a ferroelectric thin film of DIPAB was successfully fabricated on a Si substrate using a spin coating method from aqueous solution via 12-crown-4 addition at room temperature. The ferroelectric DIPAB film with a thickness of hundreds of nanometers is distributed discontinuously on the substrate in narrow strips. The direction of polarization is along the narrow strip. Piezoresponse force microscopy (PFM) shows that the ferroelectric films have two kinds of domain structures: noncharged antiparallel stripe domains and charged head-to-head (H-H)/tail-to-tail (T-T) type domains. 12-crown-4 has been proved to play important roles in forming the H-H/T-T type domains. The Chynoweth method shows that the DIPAB films synthesized in this way show a better pyroelectric effect than DIPAB crystals.
authors.affiliation: National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and School of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, P. R. China. hlcai@nju.edu.cn xswu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Kaige
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.affiliation: National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and School of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, P. R. China. hlcai@nju.edu.cn xswu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Cong
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and School of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, P. R. China. hlcai@nju.edu.cn xswu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Zepeng
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Cui
authors.affiliation: National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and School of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, P. R. China. hlcai@nju.edu.cn xswu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Chuang
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and School of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, P. R. China. hlcai@nju.edu.cn xswu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Linsong
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Gao
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Chen
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Department of Materials Science and Engineering, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, P. R. China.
authors.forename: Di
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and School of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, P. R. China. hlcai@nju.edu.cn xswu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Hong-Ling
authors.initials: HL
authors.lastname: Cai
authors.affiliation: National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and School of Physics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, P. R. China. hlcai@nju.edu.cn xswu@nju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: X S
authors.initials: XS
authors.lastname: Wu