A Highly Optical Anisotropic Hybrid Perovskite for Efficient Manipulation of Light Polarization

Optical anisotropic (e.g., birefringent) crystals can manipulate the polarization of light and thus are widely applied in modern optical fields. Common birefringent crystals are almost exclusively limited to inorganic oxides with small birefringence. Here, a new 1D hybrid halide perovskite PZPbCl3 (PZ = phenazine) is reported, which consists of perfectly parallel Pb-Cl chains and PZ cations. Remarkably, polarized optical observations show that even a PZPbCl3 crystal with micrometer thickness can modulate the polarized light efficiently. Furthermore, PZPbCl3 exhibits exceptional birefringence up to 0.65@546 nm, which is significantly larger than that of commercial oxide crystals. According to first-principles calculations and polarizability anisotropy analyses, it is found that this birefringence is mainly ascribed to the linear polymerization of pi-conjugated rings in PZ cations. Due to the rich physical properties and structural diversity of hybrid perovskites, it is believed that the introduction of excellent birefringence into the hybrid perovskites will bring unprecedented opportunities to the future explorations of polarization-dependent functional materials. Commercial inorganic birefringent crystals have limited value of birefringence, which is not conducive to the effective modulation of light polarization by birefringent optical devices. In this work, a new hybrid perovskite exhibits exceptional birefringence compared to reported ones, which leads to efficient manipulation of light polarization. image