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

该项目将在佛蒙特大学、俄克拉荷马大学、山形大学和日本大阪大学之间建立长期的跨学科合作伙伴关系。它代表了一个协调一致的主要跨学科努力，致力于在软电子材料中收集、储存和传输能量，以实现成本效益高、高通量的能量收集技术，同时培训国际科学家和促进跨文化交流。此次合作将使美国的参与者前所未有地接触到卓越的软材料和光电器件制造、表征设施，并与未来的半导体行业建立广泛的联系。独特的资源和专有技术的集中是前所未有的，使未来一代软电子材料的快速发展。美国的团队和日本的合作者在合成、原型、薄膜生长、结构、电气和光谱表征的各个方面都有互补的专业知识。到2035年使美国电网脱碳，到2050年使整个能源部门脱碳的宏伟目标将需要政策实施、工程基础设施和基础研究，以实现超越最先进水平的创新。该项目探索了软材料的基本能量转换过程，为实现2050年目标提供了潜在的变革形式因素。激子软材料为高效光伏发电和替代极低成本、高度可扩展的太阳能收集和柔性电子技术提供了潜在的变革性创新。该项目将侧重于实现新能源生产和可持续能源消费的具体目标：A)增强超过自然发生的10纳米范围的相干能量转移，这转化为缓慢的扩散和效率限制b)利用高质量的光学谐振器，包括光栅和光子晶体纳米结构，使激子耦合到光子态形成极化，并进一步扩展长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)根据晶格振动调整分子内和分子间偶极子耦合，以最小化激子结合能和降低热力学效率极限。它将为建立一个国际研究中心奠定基础，该中心拥有从有机半导体到光合生物聚合物等激子软材料的跨学科专业知识，并以2050年碳中和能源部门的社会目标为指导。该项目非常重视培养几代研究人员在国际研究合作、语言和文化能力方面的能力，将扩大伙伴关系，为实现这一雄心勃勃的跨国目标取得长期进展。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.