MURI: Doping in Organic and Printed Electronics Center (DOPE Center)

Doping of organic semiconductors plays an important and growing role in organic electronics, ranging from organic light emitting diodes and organic solar cells to thermoelectrics and bioelectronics. However, unlike Si, where parts per million dopant concentrations can significantly alter conductivity, doping organic semiconductors with molecular dopants typically requires a much higher concentration. Complex interplay between the microstructure, electronic structure and molecular interactions of the polymer and dopants has prevented systematic understanding. Progress is largely dependent on heuristically guided, slow, trial-and-error experimentation. Furthermore, only <i>p</i>-type doping has been widely implemented in organic semiconductors, and <i>n</i>-type doping has met with limited success. Thus, developing air-stable <i>n</i>-dopants is an important objective for the field of molecular dopants.<br/><br/>Supported by the DoD MURI program, the DOPE Center aims to to transform the field of solution-processed, doped conducting polymers by 1) co-designing optimized <i>p</i>- and <i>n</i> -doped conducting polymer systems and achieving facile <i>n</i>-doping, 2) extending our recent, paradigm-changing discovery of photoredox doping in conjugate polymers, 3) accelerating the pace of data generation by collaborative workflow integration of robotic experimentation and machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, 4) creating fundamental knowledge that informs novel materials synthesis and system optimization.<br/><br/>This talk will introduce the DOPE Center, and progress made up to this point. Importantly, the DOPE Center welcomes collaboration, and hopes to serve as a coalescing point to work with the large community to rapidly advance the field.