EAPSI:The Study of Novel Liquid Crystal Structures for use in Organic Solar Cell Technologies

太阳能电池代表了一种很有前途的技术，可以取代化石燃料，因为太阳可以为地球提供丰富的能量。每天都要在S表面。工业太阳能电池目前使用的无机材料比有机材料有一些优势；主要是前者比后者更有效率。然而，无机材料也很昂贵，不灵活，体积庞大，并且仅限于相对较小的面积设备。新型有机材料可用于克服当前太阳能电池技术的成本和制造限制。一种独特的有机材料？一种叫做螺旋纳米丝的液晶结构？将研究其在太阳能电池器件中的潜在有效性。这项工作将在韩国科学技术院（KAIST）进行，由世界顶级液晶对准技术专家董基允教授进行。液晶已被观察到具有优异的有机半导体性能，使其成为有机光伏发电的良好候选者。此外，已经证明弯核液晶可以形成纳米线状的？螺旋纳米细丝可以通过对流冷却、基板表面能修饰和纳米约束等多种技术进行排列。这提供了对齐这些细丝和包含第二个来宾的复合材料的能力。材料，在光伏器件内相对容易，潜在地导致更有效的激子分裂和器件内的电荷传输。我们将通过将螺旋纳米丝置于有机场效应晶体管器件中来研究其在正交方向上的载流子迁移率，从而深入了解排列螺旋纳米丝在光伏器件中的功效。该奖项是由美国国家科学基金会（NSF）和韩国国立科学研究财团共同资助的东亚太平洋暑期研究所项目，旨在支持美国研究生的暑期研究。

Solar cells represent a promising technology to replace fossil fuels due to the abundance of energy the sun provides to the Earth?s surface every day. Industrial solar cells currently use inorganic materials which have some advantages over organic materials; primarily the former are more efficient than the latter. However, inorganic materials are also expensive, inflexible and bulky, and are restricted to relatively small area devices. Novel organic materials can be used to overcome the cost and manufacturing limitations of current solar cell technologies. One unique organic material?a liquid crystal structure called a helical nanofilament?will be studied for its potential effectiveness in solar cell devices. This work will be conducted at KAIST in Korea with Professor Dong Ki Yoon, a world-leading expert in liquid crystal alignment techniques.Liquid crystals have been observed to have excellent organic semiconducting properties, making them a good candidate for use in organic photovoltaics. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that bent core liquid crystals that form ?nanowire-like? helical nanofilaments can be aligned using various techniques including convection cooling, substrate surface energy modification, and nano-confinement. This offers the ability to align these filaments, and composites containing a second ?guest? material, within photovoltaic devices with relative ease, potentially leading to more efficient exciton splitting and charge transport within devices. A first look at helical nanofilaments for use in photovoltaics will be studied by placing them within an organic field effect transistor device to extract charge carrier mobility in orthogonal directions, giving insight to the efficacy of aligned helical nanofilaments in photovoltaic devices.This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the National Research Foundation of Korea.