Natalie Stingelin, Reader in Functional Organic Materials, Department of Materials
Imperial College London, Exhibition Road, London, SW7 2AZ, UK
An ever increasing interest in the development and application of innovative optical and optoelectronic devices places greater emphasis for the advancement of new smart and functional materials that are readily processable. Significant progress has already been realised in the fields of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) and photovoltaic cells (OPVs) through development of novel semiconducting materials. Further developments in these areas are turning to the deployment of photonic structures to aid and improve light management in these systems, e.g. input-/output-coupling, enhanced absorption and waveguiding. In this work, results from a novel class of hybrid material systems that offer an outstanding set of optical and material properties, including tunable refractive index, low optical losses and solution process ability, are presented. We show that the attributes of these novel hybrid material systems can be controlled and manipulated by a range of means that include ‘alloying’ or suitable post-deposition treatments, such as thermal annealing and/or irradiation with UV-light. As a consequence, these hybrid materials can exhibit refractive indices of up to 2.1 while also being highly transparent over the entire visible, near- and mid- infrared (N-IR, M-IR) wavelength regime [1]. Furthermore, the processing properties allow the realisation of solution-based, optically low-loss photonic structures that are straightforward to implement in structures, such as OPVs. Given that the readily achievable nature of high quality optical properties and the exceptionally low loss from a single high-index up to several microns thick have already been demonstrated, the focus is here turned to the further development of this generic class of hybrid materials, which are based on metal oxide hydrates and bulk commodity polymers such as poly(vinyl alcohol). To this end, we highlight our recent efforts in introducing different metals, culminating in the successful development of mixed-metal oxide hydrate hybrid materials.
[1] M. Russo et al., J. Polym. Sci., Part B: Polym. Phys. 50(1), 65, (2011).
In collaboration with Irene Votta,1,2 Andrew Strang,1,2 George Richardson,2,3 Manuela Russo,2,3 Walter Caseri,4 Donal Bradley,1,2 and Paul Stavrinou1,2
- Department of Physics, Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ,UK
- Centre for Plastic Electronics, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK
- Department of Materials, Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, UK
- Department of Materials, ETH Zurich, CH-8093 Zürich, Switzerland
Site web du groupe de Prof. Stingelin
Cette conférence est présentée par le RQMP Versant Nord du Département de physique de l'Université de Montréal et le Département de génie physique de Polytechnique Montréal.
