High-performance polymer semiconducting heterostructure devices by nitrene-mediated photocrosslinking of alkyl side-chains

The paper titled “High-performance polymer semiconducting heterostructure devices by nitrene-mediated photocrosslinking of alkyl side-chains” has been accepted for publication by Nature Materials.

This paper describes a breakthrough in polymer organic semiconductor devices through the development of a class of benign photocrosslinkers that overcomes the long-standing re-dissolution problem of polymer films to enable high-performance polymer devices and solar cells to be fabricated using general heterostructure engineering, which was previously possible only with evaporated molecular organic semiconductors.

This work is a joint effort between the departments of Chemistry (Chua Lay-Lay: concept development and device chemistry) and Physics (Peter Ho: concept development and device physics) and centennial professor Richard Friend, together with collaborators Hardy Chan and Jeremy Burroughes (Cambridge Display Technology).

The work originally started in Richard Friend’s group, but was refined over several development cycles at NUS over the last 5 years. The joint first authors on this work are NUS students Png Rui Qi and Chia Perq-Jon; and corresponding authors are Chua, Friend and Ho.