Invited Seminar (Group Prof. Pablo Ballester) - Dr. Amparo Ruiz Carretero

📍 ICIQ Library

⏰  12:00 h

Small, Chiral and Self-Assembled: the New Recipe for Organic Electronics

Providing global energy supply in a sustainable manner is one of the main challenges of our generation. We are therefore, in the urge to find alternative resources and materials. In this sense, organic materials are the best candidates to fabricate electronic devices since we can tailor their properties by molecular design. They have other advantages such as flexibility, light weight, portability and scalability. Still, the efficiency of organic devices is far from the one of inorganic materials or perovskites. Despite the progress made in the field, the race for achieving efficiency records, has hampered research focused on solving other fundamental issues, such as device morphology and charge recombination. In this seminar, I will show different strategies to demonstrate how noncovalent interactions can enhance charge transport and device efficiency in organic photovoltaic devices.¹ In our group we incorporate hydrogen bonds to extraordinarily small semiconductors to enhance charge carrier mobility and lifetime, ^2,3 and introduce chiral centers to explore the Chiral Induced Spin Selectivity (CISS) effect to decrease charge recombination.⁴ The synthesis, self-assembly and optical properties will be shown and correlated to the charge transport results obtained by using electrodeless techniques and full devices. The spin selectivity results explored by scanning tunnel microscopy (STM) on spectroscopy mode (STS), show how it is possible to guide charge carriers through opposite chirality supramolecular structures.⁴

References:

¹T. Aytun, L. Barreda, A. Ruiz-Carretero, J. A. Lehrman, S. I. Stupp. Chem. Mater. 2015, 27, 1201-1209.

²N. R. Avila-Rovelo, G. Martinez, W. Matsuda, S. Sinn, P. Leveque, D. Schwaller, P. Mesini, S. Seki, A. Ruiz-Carretero. J. Phys. Chem. C 2022, 126, 10932

³S. Militzer, N. Nishimura, N. A. Avila-Rovelo, W. Matsuda, D. Schwaller, P. J. Mesini, S. Seki. A. Ruiz-Carretero. Chem. Eur. J. 2020, 26, 9998-10004. A. M. Garcia, A. Ruiz-Carretero. Chem. Commun. 2022, 4, 529.

⁴A. M. Garcia, G. Martinez, A. Ruiz-Carretero. Frontiers in Chemistry 2021, doi.org/10.3389/fchem.2021.722727. K. Hong, A. Kumar, A. M. Garcia, S. Majumder, A. Ruiz-Carretero. J. Chem. Phys. 2023, 159, 114903.