First-principles property assessment of hybrid formate perovskites

Abstract

Hybrid organic–inorganic formate perovskites, AB(HCOO)3, are a large family of compounds that exhibit a variety of phase transitions and diverse properties, such as (anti)ferroelectricity, ferroelasticity, (anti)ferromagnetism, and multiferroism. While many properties of these materials have already been characterized, we are not aware of any study that focuses on the comprehensive property assessment of a large number of formate perovskites. A comparison of the properties of materials within the family is challenging due to systematic errors attributed to different techniques or the lack of data. For example, complete piezoelectric, dielectric, and elastic tensors are not available. In this work, we utilize first-principles density functional theory based simulations to overcome these challenges and to report structural, mechanical, dielectric, piezoelectric, and ferroelectric properties of 29 formate perovskites. We find that these materials exhibit elastic stiffness in the range 0.5–127.0 GPa; highly anisotropic linear compressibility, including zero and even negative values; dielectric constants in the range 0.1–102.1; highly anisotropic piezoelectric response with the longitudinal values in the range 1.18–21.12 pC/N; and spontaneous polarizations in the range 0.2–7.8 μC/cm2. Furthermore, we propose and computationally characterize a few formate perovskites that have not been reported yet.