Chemistry Department Seminar

"Designing Dopants to Shield Anion Electrostatics in Doped Conjugated Polymers to Obtain Highly Mobile and Delocalized Carriers"

Presented by Taylor Aubry, UCLA

Thursday, May 23, 2019, 11:00 am — Room 300, 3rd Floor - Chemistry Bldg. 555

Doping conjugated polymers is an effective way to tune their electronic properties for thin-film electronics applications. Chemical doping of semiconducting polymers involves the introduction of a strong electron acceptor or donor molecule that can undergo charge transfer (CT) with the polymer. The CT reaction creates electrical carriers on the polymer chain (usually positive polarons a.k.a. holes) while the dopant molecules remain in the film as counterions. Undesirably, strong electrostatic attraction from the anions of most dopants will localize the polarons and reduce their mobility. We employ a new strategy utilizing substituted icosahedral dodecaborane (DDB) clusters as molecular dopants for conjugated polymers. DDBs provide a unique system in which the redox potential of the dopant can be rationally tuned via modification of the substituents without significant change to the size or shape of the dopant molecule. These clusters allow us to disentangle the effects of energetic offset on the production of free and trapped carriers in DDB-doped poly-3-hexylthiophene (P3HT) films. We find that by designing our cluster to have a high redox potential and steric protection of the core-localized electron density, highly delocalized polarons with mobilities equivalent to films doped with no anions present are obtained.1 P3HT films doped with these boron clusters have conductivities and polaron mobilities roughly an order of magnitude higher than films doped with conventional small-molecule dopants such as 2,3,5,6-tetrafluoro-7,7,8,8- tetracyanoquinodimethane (F4TCNQ). The spectral shape of the IR-region absorption for our DDB-doped polymer film closely matches the calculated theoretical spectrum for the anion at infinite distance from the polaron.2 We therefore conclude that these DDB clusters are able to effectively spatially separate the counterion. Moreover, nearly all DDB-produced carriers are free, while it has been shown that small m

Hosted by: Matthew Bird

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