Lin, YuanChai, CongcongLiu, ZhijieWang, JingJin, ShifengYang, YurongLaw, Jia YanFranco García, VictorinoShen, Baogen2025-08-132025-08-132025-04-29Lin, Y., Chai, C., Liu, Z., Wang, J., Jin, S., Yang, Y.,...,Shen, B. (2025). Large low-field-driven electrocaloric effect in organic-inorganic hybrid TMCM-CdCl3. Nature Communications, 16 (1), 4009.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58914-z.2041-1723https://hdl.handle.net/11441/176147Due to environmental-friendliness and high-efficiency, electrocaloric effect (ECE) is widely regarded as a refrigeration technology for tomorrow. Herein, utilizing organic-inorganic hybridization strategy, we achieve the largest lowfield-driven ECE and highest directly-measured electrocaloric strength (ECS) via packing sphere-like organic cation (CH3)3NCH2Cl+ (TMCM+ ) into inorganic one-dimension (1-D) CdCl3 chain framework. Single-crystal X-ray (SC-XRD) diffraction combined with Raman Spectra reveals that the simultaneous orderdisorder transition of organic cations and dramatic structure change of inorganic framework are responsible for the large ECE. Moreover, the measured P-E loops and density function theory (DFT) calculations convey that the distinctive electric-field-induced metastable phase and consequential two-step meta-electric transition could lower the transition energy barrier and account for the low driving field. This work shows that the low-symmetry interaction between inorganic framework and organic cations plays a key role in achieving large ECE under low-field, which provides a method for designing highperformance electrocaloric materials via organic-inorganic hybridization.application/pdf10 p.engAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/info:eu-repo/semantics/articleinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccesshttps://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-58914-z