Analyzing photochemical and physical processes for organic materials

Since their discovery, organic electronic materials have been of great interest as an alternative active layer material for active area materials in electronic applications. Initially studied as probes or lasing material the field has progressed to the point where both conjugated polymers and small organics have become fashionable objects of current device oriented solid state research. Organic electronic materials are liquid crystalline materials, packing into well-ordered domains when annealed thermally or via solvent annealing. The macromolecular orientation of the molecules in the solid state causes a shift in the electronic properties due to coupling of the dipoles. The amount of interaction between molecules can be correlated to different nanoscale morphologies. Such morphologies can be measured using microscopy techniques and compared to the spectroscopic results. This can then be extrapolated out to infer how the charges move within a film. Cyanine dyes represent an interesting form class of dyes as the molecular packing is strongly affected by hydrophilic and hydrophobic pendent groups, which cause the dye to arrange into a tubular bilayer. Spectroelectrochemistry is used to monitor and controllably oxidize the samples. Using singular value decomposition (SVD) it is possible to extract each electronic species formed during electrochemical oxidation and model the proposed species using semi empirical quantum mechanical calculations. Polyfluorene is a blue luminescent polymer of interest for its high quantum yield. The solution and solid-state conformation has shown two distinct phases. The formation of the secondary phase shows a dependence on the molecular weight. In a poor solvent, as the molecular weight increases, the secondary phase forms easier. In the solid state, the highly efficient blue emission from polyfluorene is degraded by ketone defects. The energy transfer to preexisting ketone defects is increased as the filmed is thermally ordered. Glass transitions of block copolymers are studied using synthetically novel polymers where an environmentally sensitive fluorescent reporter is placed within various regions of a self-assembled film. Different dynamics are observed within the block of the film then specifically at the interface of two blocks.