Collaborative Research: Energy Transfer in Strongly Coupled Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Systems

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Non-technical Description: Energy transfer between molecular systems lies at the heart of several natural and artificial energy harvesting systems as well as in high-performance light emitters and sensors. Thus understanding and controlling the energy transfer process are of significant importance to both fundamental research and technological applications. This collaborative project develops artificial organic-inorganic hybrid systems where the energy transfer process is controlled by engineering the surrounding optical environment. The results of the project will provide guidelines for the design of efficient energy transferring organic/inorganic molecular systems geared towards applications such as next-generation solar cells, light emitting diodes and sensors. The project provides training in an interdisciplinary environment to graduate and undergraduate students at City College of New York and University of Michigan. In addition, the project integrates with outreach efforts such as high-school student participation in the research and public lectures/demonstrations to local-area high-school students. These are excellent recruiting and training tools for future scientists and engineers.Technical Description: The primary goal of this project is to elucidate the role of exciton wavefunction delocalization in the energy transfer process between donor and acceptor molecules and to develop methods to control it using artificially engineered systems. In this context researchers develop artificially engineered energy transfer systems through strongly coupled organic-inorganic hybrid excitons. By exploiting the fundamentally different nature of excitons in organic and inorganic systems and hybridizing them provides a whole new control parameter for energy transfer. Here the coupling strengths and exciton wavefunctions are controlled via light, morphology and dimensionality. Specific materials systems investigated include inorganic excitons of zinc oxide (ZnO) and cadmium sulfide (CdS) quantum dots and the organic excitons of polycrystalline organic 3,4,7,8 napthalenetetracarboxylic dianhydride (NTCDA) and anthracene. These studies are designed to form the basis for developing highly efficient energy transfer systems for practical applications.