Organic electronics, which utilize either polymeric materials and small molecules to fabricate functional electronic devices and sensors, offer a different set of possibilities over their traditional inorganic counterparts, including flexibility, lightweight, and access to solution-based fabrication protocols.
Thanks to the advancements of this field, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are now a commercial reality while other devices such as organic field-effect transistors (OFETs), organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs), and organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are progressing very rapidly. In these applications, conjugated polymers play an important role because of the possibility of easily modifying their electronic and morphological properties through chemical synthesis and their reproducible performances across device architectures, however, their high processability is often incompatible with more demanding fabrication strategies that might require several consecutive processes.
In our lab, we are developing highly-processable conjugated precursors that can be either used to immobilize semiconducting materials, thus making the design of orthogonal fabrication procedures more straightforward, or modify their chemical structures at a later stage to insert functionalities that would not be compatible with the polymerization procedures.
Examples of publications:
- “Preparation of Different Conjugated Polymers Characterized by Complementary Electronic Properties from an Identical Precursor” M. Carlotti, T. Losi, F. De Boni, F.M. Vivaldi, E. Araya-Hermosilla, M. Prato, A. Pucci, M. Caironi, V. Mattoli, Polymer Chemistry, 2023, doi: 10.1039/D3PY00868A
- “Empirical Parameter to Compare Molecule–Electrode Interfaces in Large-Area Molecular Junctions” M. Carlotti, S. Soni, A. Kovalchuk, S. Kumar, S. Hofmann, R.C. Chiechi, ACS Phys. Chem Au, 2022, 2, 179-190 doi: 10.1021/acsphyschemau.1c00029
