PIRE: US-Japan Partnership in Excitonic Soft Materials for Clean Energy

该项目将在佛蒙特大学、俄克拉何马大学、山形大学和日本大阪大学之间建立长期的跨学科伙伴关系。它代表着一项协调一致的重大跨学科努力，致力于收集、储存和转移软电子材料中的能量，以实现具有成本效益的高通量能量收集技术，同时培训国际科学家和促进跨文化交流。这一合作关系将为美国与会者带来前所未有的机会，获得非凡的软材料和光电设备制造、表征设施，以及与未来半导体行业的广泛联系。资源和技术的独特集中是史无前例的，使未来一代软电子材料能够快速发展。美国的团队和日本的合作者在合成、原型制作、薄膜生长、结构、电气和光谱表征的各个方面都拥有互补的专业知识。这一雄心勃勃的目标是到2035年实现美国电网的脱碳，到2050年实现整个能源行业的脱碳，这将需要政策执行、工程基础设施和基础研究来实现超出最先进水平的创新。该项目探索了软材料中的基本能源转换过程，这些过程提供了实现2050年目标所需的潜在变革性形式因素。激子软材料为高效率的光伏和替代的极低成本和高度可扩展的太阳能收集和灵活的电子技术提供了潜在的变革性创新。该项目将重点关注旨在实现新能源生产和可持续能源消耗的具体目标：a)加强超过自然产生的10 nm范围的相干能量转移，这意味着缓慢扩散和效率限制；b)利用包括光栅和光子晶体纳米结构在内的高质量光学谐振器，使激子能够耦合到光子态形成极化子，并进一步延长远距离的共振能量转移；c)探索有机界面上的热载流子转移；d)调整分子内和分子间偶极与晶格振动的耦合，以最小化激子结合能和降低热力学效率极限。它将为一个在从有机半导体到光合作用生物聚合物等激子软材料方面拥有跨学科专业知识的国际研究中心奠定基础，该中心将遵循到2050年实现能源行业碳中性的社会目标。该项目的重点是培养一代又一代的研究人员在国际研究合作、语言和文化能力方面的能力，该项目将扩大合作伙伴关系，以实现这一雄心勃勃的跨国目标。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project will establish a long-term interdisciplinary partnership between the University of Vermont, University of Oklahoma, Yamagata University, and Osaka University in Japan. It represents a concerted major interdisciplinary effort dedicated to harvesting, storing, and transferring energy in soft electronic materials for cost effective, high-throughput energy harvesting technologies, while training international scientists and promoting intercultural exchange. This partnership will bring the US-based participants unprecedented access to the remarkable soft-materials and optoelectronic device fabrication, characterization facilities, and extensive connections with semiconductor industries of tomorrow. The unique concentration of resources and knowhow is unprecedented and enables rapid progress for the future generation of soft electronic materials. The US-based team and Japan-based collaborators complementary expertise spans all aspects of synthesis, prototyping, thin-film growth, structural, electrical, and spectroscopic characterization. The ambitious goal to decarbonize the US electrical grid by 2035 and the entire energy sector by 2050 will require policy implementation, engineering infrastructure, and fundamental research to realize innovations beyond the state-of-the-art. The project explores fundamental energy conversion processes in soft materials, which offer potentially transformative form factors necessary to realize the 2050 targets. Excitonic soft materials offer potentially transformative innovations towards high efficiency photovoltaics and alternative extremely-low-cost and highly scalable solar energy harvesting and flexible electronics technologies. The project will focus on specific goals aimed at enabling new energy production and sustainable energy consumption: a) enhance the coherent energy transfer beyond the naturally occurring 10 nm range which translates to slow diffusion and efficiency limitations b) leverage high-quality optical resonators, including gratings and photonic crystal nano-architectures, towards enabling excitons coupling to photonic states to form polaritons and further extending resonant energy transfer over long range, c) explore the hot carrier transfer at organic interfaces and d) tailor the intra and inter-molecular dipoles coupling to lattice vibrations towards minimizing the exciton binding energy and lowering the thermodynamic efficiency limit. It will lay a foundation for an international research hub with trans-disciplinary expertise in excitonic soft materials ranging from organic semiconductors to photosynthetic biopolymers guided by the societal goal of carbon-neutral energy sector by 2050. With a heavy emphasis on training generations of researchers in international research collaboration, language, and cultural competency, the project will expand the partnership for long-term progress towards this ambitious trans-national goal.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.