The high-temperature behavior of CsH2PO4 has been carefully examined under both
ambient and high pressure (1.0 ± 0.2 GPa) conditions. Ambient pressure experiments
encompassed thermal analysis, AC impedance spectroscopy, 1H NMR spectroscopy, and
polarized light microscopy. Simultaneous thermogravimetric analysis, differential scanning
calorimetry, and evolved gas analysis by mass spectroscopy demonstrated that a structural
transition with an enthalpy of 49.0 ± 2.5 J/g occurred at 228 ± 2 °C, just prior to thermal
decomposition. The details of the decomposition pathway were highly dependent on sample
surface area, however the structural transformation, a superprotonic transition, was not.
Polarized light microscopy showed the high temperature phase to be optically isotropic in
nature, consistent with earlier suggestions that this phase is cubic. The conductivity of CsH2PO4, as revealed by the impedance measurements, exhibited a sharp increase at the transition
temperature, from 1.2 × 10-5 to 9.0 × 10-3 Ω1-cm-1, followed by a rapid decline due to
dehydration. In addition, chemically adsorbed surface water was shown to increase the
conductivity of polycrystalline CsH2PO4 over well-dried samples, even at mildly elevated
temperatures (>200 °C). At high pressure an apparent irreversible phase transition at 150
°C and a reversible superprotonic phase transition at 260 °C were observed by impedance
spectroscopy. At the superprotonic transition, the conductivity increased sharply by ∼3 orders
of magnitude to 3.5 × 10-2 Ω1-cm-1 at 275 °C. This high conductivity phase was stable to
the highest temperature examined, 375 °C, and exhibited reproducible and highly Arrhenius
conduction behavior, with an activation energy for charge transport of 0.35 eV. Upon cooling,
CsH2PO4 remained in the high-temperature phase to a temperature of 240 °C.