A ferroelectric helical polymer

This communication introduces helical polyacetylene (P1) with an appended acceptor (A)-donor (D)-acceptor (A) conjugated chromophore as a promising ferroelectric candidate. The helical conformation of P1 leads to a highly stable chiral assembly of the appended ADA chromophores. This results in prominent ferroelectricity as evident from the superior hysteresis loop at room temperature, exhibiting a saturation polarization (P_S) value ∼2 μC cm^-2 and remanent polarization (P_r) value ∼1.8 μC cm^-2 at a low coercive field (E_c) of 5.2 kV cm^-1, rarely reported before for purely organic systems.