Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis Facility Overview
This Facility’s expertise lies in instrumentation and techniques dedicated to the study of "soft" materials: organic molecules, macromolecules, polymers and their assemblies, with access to functional systems, photoactive, organic-inorganic hybrid and porous materials. The laboratories in this Facility house several glove boxes, polymerization reactors, and high-end instrumentation for purification and analysis of both small organic molecules and macromolecules.
The state-of-art electronic device laboratory houses equipment for solution and/or dry processing of devices, which include glove boxes, thermal evaporators, spin coaters, photovoltaic testing station, surface profiler, and spectrometers. Synthesis techniques range from "classical" organic to combinatorial to polymerizations in solution, bulk, emulsion and suspension.
This Facility’s internal research projects involve interfacing organic and inorganic materials and the construction of supramolecular materials using nanoscale building blocks and systems. Facility staff have developed nanoporous and microporous materials with controlled chemistry, porosity and pore size, as well as their application to the storage of hydrogen, the separation of macromolecules, ionization, and detection. They also study programmed self assembly of electro-active components into molecular and supramolecular nanostructures for advanced applications, such as molecular switches, highly ordered donor-acceptor arrays, 1D organic nanowires and higher order nanostructures.
The current research also involves the investigation of novel materials and device architectures for new generation electronic devices, such as organic photovoltaics, organic light emitting diodes, and thin film transistors. The materials of particular interest are photoactive molecules and charge transporting organic semiconductors. The major purpose of this research is to develop a fundamental understating of the relationship between material molecular structures and properties. With the ability of controlling molecular structure and property efficiently, the Facility is can fabricate high performing solid state electronic devices.
Research efforts are directed toward advancements in:
- nanomaterials for microelectronics, affording both low band gap polymers, low-k dielectrics and molecules for advanced patterning;
- nanoscale devices constructed from organic-inorganic hybrid materials that relay chemical information from living cells;
- solution processable small molecules for efficient organic photovoltaics, new techniques for fabrication of organic electronic devices, materials for near infrared and white organic light emitting diodes and studies of effects of morphology of thin films on performance of devices; and
- nanoreactors containing immobilized enzymes mimicking metabolic paths as well as enabling processing of biological macromolecules.
