"Forbidden" polarisation and extraordinary piezoelectric effect in organometallic lead halide perovskites

Abstract

Organometallic lead halide perovskites are highly efficient materials for solar cells and other optoelectronic applications due to their high quantum efficiency and exceptional semiconducting properties. A peculiarity of these perovskites is the substantial ionic motion under external forces. Here, we reveal that electric field-and light-induced ionic motion in MAPbX3 crystals (X=Cl, Br, I and MA=CH3NH3) leads to unexpected piezoelectric-like response, an order of magnitude larger than in ferroelectric perovskite oxides. The nominal macroscopic symmetry of the crystals is broken by redistribution of ionic species, which can be controlled deterministically by light and electric field. The revealed piezoelectric response is possibly present in other materials with significant ionic activity but the unique feature of organometallic perovskites is the strong effect on the piezoelectric response of interplay of ionic motion (MA+ and X-1) and photoelectrons generated with illumination.

References in corpus (6)

• Quantification of Ion Migration in CH3NH3PbI3 Perovskite Solar Cells by Transient Capacitance Measurements
• Tetragonal CH3NH3PbI3 Is Ferroelectric
• Induced Giant Piezoelectricity in Centrosymmetric Oxides
• Thermodynamics of Electromechanically-Coupled Mixed Ionic-Electronic Conductors: Deformation potential, Vegard strains and Flexoelectric effect
• Nanoscale Electromechanics of Paraelectric Materials with Mobile Charges: Size effects and Nonlinearity of Electromechanical Response of SrTiO3 Films
• Enhanced Piezoelectric Response in Hybrid Lead Halide Perovskite Thin Films via Interfacing with Ferroelectric PbZr${}_{0.2}$Ti${}_{0.8}$O${}_3$

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Beyond 1 ms Charge-Carrier Recombination Dynamics in the CsPbBr3 Perovskite
• Dynamics of Photoinduced Charge Carriers in Metal-Halide Perovskites