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

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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.