Plastics and other organic materials can be fashioned into bendy, stretchy sheets. Exploiting that flexibility for electronic devices entails finding organics that exhibit useful phenomena. Display panels in cell phones already make use of the semiconductivity and light emission of two organics, polyfluorene and poly(phenylene-vinylene). Ultrathin e-readers are already on the market.
Now, Sachio Horiuchi of Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Yoshinori Tokura of the University of Tokyo, and their collaborators have found an organic material that exhibits another technologically useful phenomenon, ferroelectricity: the ability to switch polarization in response to an electric field. 1 Ferroelectrics, as well as their cousins, piezoelectrics and pyroelectrics, have a host of applications, including nonvolatile memory, mechanical actuation, and temperature sensing.
The new ferroelectric is the crystalline form of croconic acid, an organic dye first synthesized in 1825 by Heinrich Gmelin. He named his discovery after κρóκoς, the Greek...
