This CAREER award in the Inorganic, Bioinorganic and Organometallic Chemistry program supports work by Professor Stefan Bernhard at Princeton University to construct luminophoric transition metal based materials. Parallel synthetic techniques and parallel screening techniques for photochemical and electrochemical properties will target photoconversion efficiency and stability of photoactive materials. Rigid cage structures will be utilized to inhibit non-radiative decay processes. Combinatorial techniques will be employed to screen the excited state properties of new coordination based materials for both light emitting diode and solar energy conversion applications. Ionic transition metal luminophores will be investigated for light emitting diode development, chiral metal complexes with mesogenic tails will be employed to generate dissymmetric emission (circularly polarized luminescence). Materials with long lived excited states will be identified and examined for electron transfer quenching with redox mediating reagents to explore photolytic cleavage of water using high throughput analysis of gaseous products. An outreach program at Princeton High School that exposes students to optoelectronics will be extended to additional schools, and visits to elementary schools will be expanded to urban New Jersey sites.
Improved organic light emitting diodes have found increasingly sophisticated application in electronic display technologies. Tuning excited state properties of metal centered chromophores in order to modify emission wavelength, charge transport behavior, and absorption profile is central to this project.
