CAREER: Introducing Hierarchical Architectures into Advanced Functional Organic Materials Controlling the Secondary and Tertiary Structure of Carbon Nanocoils

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In this project funded by the Macromolecular, Supramolecular, and Nanochemistry Program of the Division of Chemistry, Professor Felix Fischer of the University of California at Berkley is developing new synthetic polymers that can mimic the diverse structural features of naturally occurring biological polymers. Polymers are long chain organic molecules and are found in many facets of everyday life, and while synthetic polymers have been adapted to almost every aspect of our industrialized culture, their performance and structural diversity still falls short when compared to their biological analogues. The diversity both in architecture and function emerging from biological polymers ranges from molecular machinery, data and energy storage, to structural support that spans over several orders of magnitude, e.g. from the size of a sugar molecule (tiny fractions of a millimeter) to the height of a Sequoia tree (greater than 100 meters). The educational activities being pursued include the education and training of undergraduate and graduate students, establishing a "Girls Day" at the College of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, and participating in the "Touch a Molecule" program as a content contributor and a mentor.In this project, Professor Fischer is developing new synthetic tools to encode higher order structure and complex function into artificial polymers with the goal of tuning both their physical properties (e.g. size, shape, electronic structure) and function (chemical reactivity or response to external stimuli) at the molecular scale and controlling both their programmed assembly and their cooperative interaction in precisely defined higher order architectures. Specifically, Professor Fischer is synthesizing poly(arylene ethynylenes) (PAEs) and "carbon nanocoils" using a relatively new polymerization methodology: ring-opening alkyne metathesis (ROAMP). The experimental plans includes exploring methodology to synthesize ring-strained monomers to access ortho-, meta-, and para-substituted PAEs, to develop molybdenum alkylidyne catalysts that well effect a living polymerization of the monomers, to study the conformational folding and secondary structures of the resultant PAEs, and to direct their further self-assembly.