New click reactions for conjugated polymers

共轭聚合物是一类非常有前途的材料，用于各种应用，从激光器或显示器等光电器件的有源组件到太阳能电池、传感器、致动器、电容器和生物电子器件。它们在这些领域应用的关键是能够调节聚合物的电子和物理性质。到目前为止，大多数操纵这些性质的方法都依赖于适当的单体材料的共聚。例如，由于前沿分子轨道的杂化，将不同量的缺电子单体掺入富电子主链中可导致对带隙的显著影响，而支链或直链侧链的掺入可用于调节聚合物结晶度和可加工性。然而，由于必须合成不同共聚单体比例的批次，因此在这种共聚物中建立结构-性能关系是复杂的，其中难以将主链化学变化的影响与不同批次的分子量、端基和分散性的变化分开。已知后者对聚合物性能具有显著影响，并且当共聚单体比率变化时难以控制。这项工作将克服这些困难，通过开发的方法，直接修改的共轭聚合物后聚合的芳香族主链，从而使具有一致的分散性和长度的库的合成。

Conjugated polymers are a highly promising class of materials for a diverse range of applications, from the active components of optoelectronic devices like lasers or displays, to solar cells, sensors, actuators, capacitors and bioelectronics devices. The key to their application in these areas is the ability to tune both the electronic and physical properties of the polymer. To date most approaches to manipulate such properties have relied on the copolymerisation of appropriate monomeric materials. For example the incorporation of varying amounts of electron deficient monomers into an electron rich backbone can result in significant influence on the band gap due to the hybridisation of the frontier molecular orbitals, whereas the incorporation of branched or linear sidechains can be utilised to tune polymer crystallinity and processability. However the establishment of structure-property relationships in such copolymers is complicated by the necessity to synthesise batches of varying comonomer ratios, in which it is difficult to disentangle the influence of changes in the backbone chemistry from variations in the molecular weight, end-groups and dispersities of different batches. The later are known to have a significant impact on polymer performance, and are difficult to control as comonomer ratios vary. This work will overcome these difficulties by the development of methods to directly modify the aromatic backbone of the conjugated polymer post-polymerisation, thus enabling the synthesis of libraries with consistent dispersity and length.