WFU Joint Physics and Chemistry Colloquium

TITLE: Material design for organic electronics

SPEAKER: Professor John E. Anthony,

TIME: Wednesday Februrary 16, 2011 at 4:00 PM

PLACE: Room 101 Olin Physical Laboratory

Organic electronics promises high performance, light weight and flexible electronics that can be fabricated at low cost due to the propensity for organic materials to self-assemble. By carefully designing organic chromophores, this self-assembly process can be exploited to enhance optoelectronic properties (such as fluorescence quantum yield or transport properties) while still allowing simple solution-based processing techniques. This talk will begin with a description and discussion related to issues in organic field-effect transistors, followed by a series of design rules for the creation of high-performance organic semiconductors. These rules will then be extended to focus on the nucleation and growth of organic crystals, discussing methods to control crystallization rate, grain size and the exploitation of self-assembly processes for the simple patterning of organic-based electronic devices. The topic will then switch to photovoltaics, and here again a series of design rules will be established, followed by systematic progress toward optimizing conversion efficiency. We find that certain crystal packing motifs lend themselves to the type of self-assembly necessary for photovoltaic applications, and show that this motif exhibits consistent high performance across a broad range of compounds.