Plastic electronics: excitons and solar cells

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• Professor Sir Richard Friend FRS
• Wednesday 08 February 2012, 17:30-19:00
• Lecture Theatre G16 SAF.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Clare E Drysdale.

Pi-conjugated organic molecules and polymers now provide a set of well-performing semiconductors that support a wide range of devices, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as used in smart-phone displays, field-effect transistors (FETs) and photovoltaic diodes (PVs). These are attractive materials to manufacture, particularly for large-area applications where they be processed by direct printing. In this talk I will illustrate those aspects of the physics of their electronic properties that distinguish them from inorganic semiconductors, and that have required specific engineering of material and device design. In particular, these materials have low dielectric constants, and the consequently poor screening of Coulomb interactions causes electron-hole excitations (excitons) to be strongly bound. This often gives very high luminescence efficiency, as required for use in LEDs. For PVs, splitting of excitons to form free electrons and holes can be achieved efficiently at heterojunctions formed between materials with different electronegativities, which act as electron ‘donor’ and ‘acceptor’. The design of device architecture to provide the required large heterojunction interfacial area has been developed with considerable success.

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