Ferroelectricity and Charge Ordering in Quasi One-Dimensional Organic Conductors

Abstract

The family of molecular conductors TMTTF/TMTSF-X demonstrates almost all known electronic phases in parallel with a set of weak structural modifications of anion ordering and mysterious structureless transitions. Only in early 2000's their nature became elucidated by discoveries of a huge anomaly in the dielectric permittivity and by the NMR evidences for the charge ordering (disproportionation). These observations have been interpreted as the never expected ferroelectric transition. The phenomenon unifies a variety of different concepts and observations in quite unusual aspects or conjunctions: ferroelectricity of good conductors, structural instability towards the Mott-Hubbard state, Wigner crystallization in a dense electronic system, the ordered 4K_F density wave, richness of physics of solitons, interplay of structural and electronic symmetries. The corresponding theory of the "combined Mott-Hubbard state" deals with orthogonal contributions to the Umklapp scattering of electrons coming from the two symmetry breaking effects: the build-in nonequivalence of bonds and the spontaneous nonequivalence of sites. The state gives rise to several types of solitons, all of them showing in experiments. On this basis we can interpret the complex of existing experiments, and suggest some future ones, such as optical absorption and photoconductivity, combined ferroelectric resonance and the phonon anti-resonance, plasma frequency reduction.