Controlled Growth and Optoelectronic Characterization of Crystalline Oriented Organic P-N Junction Nanostructures

有机半导体及其在太阳能电池等电子设备中的应用由于制造成本低、机械灵活性强和使用通用材料而需求量很大。有机光伏电池（opv）已经证明了10%的能量转换效率。然而，为了继续生产高效的器件，在材料水平上理解和控制器件界面的分子取向和微观结构将是至关重要的。这个项目的成果将在努力理解晶体化学、分子堆积和分子界面上的电荷/能量传输的研究领域产生广泛的影响。该项目将获得影响未来opv设计的基础知识，这些知识是通过研究传统设备无法获得的。pi还将利用他们在向广泛的科学界和公众传播跨学科研究的兴奋方面的广泛记录。通过利用和参与针对春田技术社区学院STEM专业学生的多方面实习/指导计划，pi将鼓励扩大STEM的参与，以加强化学和工程领域代表性不足的学生的数量。在纳米尺度上使用具有控制结晶度的有机半导体将对加速有机电子学的新兴领域产生重大影响，因为这些高度有序的系统将使研究人员能够从主流设备中使用的非晶和/或多晶薄膜中常见的无序系统中提取无法准确确定的固有电荷载流子输运现象。此外，了解结晶机制将使研究人员能够为太阳能电池器件应用生产各种架构。该研究项目的目标是培养离散的、定向的、结晶的有机P-N结，将纳米形态与光电特性联系起来，并建立探测这些半导体纳米器件中的电荷和激子输运现象的实验方法。单纳米线水平测量也将定义这些一维纳米结构系统性能的基本限制。该项目将使人们能够将基础科学与应用研究联系起来，这将是发现纳米级电子领域潜在新设备概念的核心，如太阳能电池、垂直晶体管、电池和传感器。

Organic semiconductors and their use in electronic devices such as solar cells are in high demand due to low cost fabrication, mechanical flexibility, and use of commonly sourced materials. Organic photovoltaic cells (OPVs) have already demonstrated power conversion efficiencies of 10%. However, to continue producing highly efficient devices, it will be critical to understand and control molecular orientation and microstructure at the interfaces of the device at the material level. The outcome from this program will have a broad impact in research areas striving to understand crystal chemistry, molecular packing, and charge/energy transport at molecular interfaces. This project will result in fundamental knowledge to impact the design of future OPVs that could not be gained through study of conventional devices. The PIs will also leverage their extensive track records of communicating the excitement of interdisciplinary research to a broad scientific community and to the general public. The PIs will encourage broadening participation in STEM by leveraging and participating in a multifaceted internship/mentoring program that targets STEM-major students from Springfield Technical Community College to fortify the number of underrepresented students in chemistry and engineering.The use of organic semiconductors with controlled crystallinity at the nanoscale will have a major impact in accelerating the emerging area of organic electronics, as these highly ordered systems will enable researchers to extract intrinsic charge carrier transport phenomena that cannot be accurately determined from disordered systems common to amorphous and/or polycrystalline films used in mainstream devices. In addition, understanding crystallization mechanisms will enable researchers to produce a variety of architectures for solar cell device applications. The goal of the research project is to grow discrete, oriented, crystalline organic P-N junctions, correlate nanomorphologies to optoelectronic properties and establish experimental methods for probing charge and exciton transport phenomena in these semiconductor nanodevices. Single nanowire level measurements will also define the fundamental limits of performance in these 1-D nanostructured systems. The project will enable one to bridge fundamental science with applied research that will be central to the discovery of potentially new device concepts in areas of nanoscale electronics, such as solar cells, vertical transistors, batteries, and sensors.