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Lecture

Organic Electronic Materials: Fundamentals and Applications

In course

MSE-486: Organic electronic materials

This course will introduce students to the field of organic electronic materials. The goal of this course is to discuss the origin of electronic properties in organic materials, charge transport mechanisms, chemical synthesis, materials processing, and dev ...

Description

This lecture covers the interdisciplinary research on organic electronic materials, focusing on system performance, synthesis, processing, and properties. Topics include intramolecular electron delocalization, organic semiconductor materials preparation, basic organic electronic devices, and advanced topics like bioelectronics and spintronics. The course also includes requirements for exercises, grading system, course schedule, and teaching assistants.

Instructor

Holger Frauenrath

Holger Frauenrath (born in Aachen, Germany) studied chemistry at RWTH Aachen , Germany from 1992 to 1997, with a focus on synthetic organic chemistry. He performed his PhD thesis from 1998 to 2001 in the research group of Prof Hartwig Höcker at RWTH Aachen, working on a project related to the stereospecific polymerization of methacrylates as well as their copolymerization with olefins using zirconocene catalysts. Holger Frauenrath then joined the group of Prof. Sam Stupp at Northwestern University , Evanston, IL, USA, as a postdoctoral fellow supported by a Feodor Lynen fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation . His postdoctoral research projects were centered around the supramolecular self-assembly of rod-coil molecules. Holger Frauenrath returned to Germany in 2003 and started to build his own research group at FU Berlin, funded with an Emmy Noether Grant from the German Science Foundation . In 2005, the research group moved to the Department of Materials at ETH Zurich , Switzerland, where it became a scientifcally independent part of the Polymer Chemistry Group led by Prof. A. Dieter Schlüter . Holger Frauenrath obtained his Habilitation from ETH Zurich in 2009. In 2009, Holger Frauenrath has been appointed as a professor at the Institute of Materials (IMX) of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) , Switzerland, building the new Laboratory of Macromolecular and Organic Materials (LMOM) . In the same year, Holger Frauenrath was received the prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Investigator grant.

Official source

Related concepts (31)

Organic solar cell

An organic solar cell (OSC) or plastic solar cell is a type of photovoltaic that uses organic electronics, a branch of electronics that deals with conductive organic polymers or small organic molecules, for light absorption and charge transport to produce electricity from sunlight by the photovoltaic effect. Most organic photovoltaic cells are polymer solar cells. The molecules used in organic solar cells are solution-processable at high throughput and are cheap, resulting in low production costs to fabricate a large volume.

Organic electronics

Organic electronics is a field of materials science concerning the design, synthesis, characterization, and application of organic molecules or polymers that show desirable electronic properties such as conductivity. Unlike conventional inorganic conductors and semiconductors, organic electronic materials are constructed from organic (carbon-based) molecules or polymers using synthetic strategies developed in the context of organic chemistry and polymer chemistry.

Organic semiconductor

Organic semiconductors are solids whose building blocks are pi-bonded molecules or polymers made up by carbon and hydrogen atoms and – at times – heteroatoms such as nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen. They exist in the form of molecular crystals or amorphous thin films. In general, they are electrical insulators, but become semiconducting when charges are either injected from appropriate electrodes, upon doping or by photoexcitation. In molecular crystals the energetic separation between the top of the valence band and the bottom conduction band, i.

Molecular orbital

In chemistry, a molecular orbital (ɒrbədl) is a mathematical function describing the location and wave-like behavior of an electron in a molecule. This function can be used to calculate chemical and physical properties such as the probability of finding an electron in any specific region. The terms atomic orbital and molecular orbital were introduced by Robert S. Mulliken in 1932 to mean one-electron orbital wave functions. At an elementary level, they are used to describe the region of space in which a function has a significant amplitude.

Molecular orbital theory

In chemistry, molecular orbital theory (MO theory or MOT) is a method for describing the electronic structure of molecules using quantum mechanics. It was proposed early in the 20th century. In molecular orbital theory, electrons in a molecule are not assigned to individual chemical bonds between atoms, but are treated as moving under the influence of the atomic nuclei in the whole molecule. Quantum mechanics describes the spatial and energetic properties of electrons as molecular orbitals that surround two or more atoms in a molecule and contain valence electrons between atoms.

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