Organic semiconductors and their use in electronic devices such as solar cells are in high demand due to low cost fabrication, mechanical flexibility, and use of commonly sourced materials. Organic photovoltaic cells (OPVs) have already demonstrated power conversion efficiencies of 10%. However, to continue producing highly efficient devices, it will be critical to understand and control molecular orientation and microstructure at the interfaces of the device at the material level. The outcome from this program will have a broad impact in research areas striving to understand crystal chemistry, molecular packing, and charge/energy transport at molecular interfaces. This project will result in fundamental knowledge to impact the design of future OPVs that could not be gained through study of conventional devices. The PIs will also leverage their extensive track records of communicating the excitement of interdisciplinary research to a broad scientific community and to the general public. The PIs will encourage broadening participation in STEM by leveraging and participating in a multifaceted internship/mentoring program that targets STEM-major students from Springfield Technical Community College to fortify the number of underrepresented students in chemistry and engineering.
The use of organic semiconductors with controlled crystallinity at the nanoscale will have a major impact in accelerating the emerging area of organic electronics, as these highly ordered systems will enable researchers to extract intrinsic charge carrier transport phenomena that cannot be accurately determined from disordered systems common to amorphous and/or polycrystalline films used in mainstream devices. In addition, understanding crystallization mechanisms will enable researchers to produce a variety of architectures for solar cell device applications. The goal of the research project is to grow discrete, oriented, crystalline organic P-N junctions, correlate nanomorphologies to optoelectronic properties and establish experimental methods for probing charge and exciton transport phenomena in these semiconductor nanodevices. Single nanowire level measurements will also define the fundamental limits of performance in these 1-D nanostructured systems. The project will enable one to bridge fundamental science with applied research that will be central to the discovery of potentially new device concepts in areas of nanoscale electronics, such as solar cells, vertical transistors, batteries, and sensors.
