Chemistry Department Seminar

“What Matters When Designing Photoactive Organic Materials?”

With limited natural resources and a growing global population, cheaper materials that lower our energy consumption are critical. Organic molecules provide flexible, cheap, and tunable building blocks for new materials but:

    • how do molecular properties translate to material systems?

    • what properties are critical for better solar cells? Computer chips? TV displays? Batteries?

    • can you design a material completely in the computer before ever making it?

Chemical intuition is well developed for single molecules but the extent to which disorder in solid state molecular materials contributes to their properties is poorly understood. In particular, molecular materials move charges in some directions much more efficiently than others due to the packing of the molecules. Noncovalent interactions between the molecular components mean that dynamic disorder in these materials can have a large impact on the electronic properties of these materials at room temperature. Modern super computers allow chemists to predict the photochemistry of molecules and directly model the chemistry and physics of materials to better understand their properties. Here we explore how packing and vibrations in organic crystals effect charge transport in light driven devices.