LEAPS-MPS: Conformational Inversion in Heterotriangulenes for Ferroelectric Switching

Amherst College, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: The generation of new and access to existing digital information is critical to the continued advancement of society. Cloud data storage offers global access to digital information and allows portable devices to generate and interface with data that need not be stored locally; however, the negative impacts of Cloud storage facilities include energy inefficiency, land use allocation, and resource management. While global information sharing is an appropriate use of Cloud storage strategies, compensating for limited local storage capacity is, fundamentally, a challenge that can be addressed by increasing the storage density of data storage materials. With this LEAPS-MPS award, the research team investigates a new class of carbon-based molecular materials for non-volatile digital information storage with the potential to decrease the size of a bit of data by several orders of magnitude relative to traditional ferroelectric technologies and an order of magnitude relative to leading memory capacitor technologies. Ferroelectricity is a phenomenon by which information can be stored within the electronic polarization vector of a material. The potential use of this use of these materials would enable a technology that works by encoding information into the three-dimensional shape of a single molecule that can be modified with the application of an electric field. As part of this LEAPS-MPS project, undergraduate students at Amherst College learn advanced materials synthesis and engineering strategies. Additionally, this research encourages discussion of the sustainability, equity, and accessibility of local and remote data storage structures and inspires a reimagining of how these issues may be addressed. TECHNICAL SUMMARY: The investigation of organic materials for practical information storage applications has long been precluded by the lack of organic ferroelectric systems that operate at or near room temperature. Ferroelectricity in organic crystals generally arises from collective rotation and/or displacement of molecules in the solid-state in response to an applied electric field. However, such mechanisms are sensitive to the details of crystal packing, which cannot yet be reliably predicted in silico. This project, supported by a LEAPS-MPS award, seeks to develop fundamental mechanistic insight for a new class of organic ferroelectrics that take advantage of the conformational inversion of bowl-shaped heteroatom-centered triangulene compounds (heterotriangulenes) for ferroelectric switching. Researchers investigate whether ferroelectric switching in the solid state is strongly correlated with the energetics of molecular conformational inversion rather than unpredictable subtleties of crystal packing, and subsequently study the tunability of ferroelectric performance through molecular design principles. The results of this research establish the foundation for a new class of ferroelectrics with the potential to approach the single-molecule limit for data storage. This research is conducted by a diverse and cross-disciplinary team of undergraduate researchers who receive training in organic and materials syntheses, X-ray crystallography, and device fabrication. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.