The palate used to create high performance organic electronic materials is rich in aromatic building blocks, including numerous variations of benzene, thiophene and pyrrole rings. Although these materials can be photoexcited leading to subsequent exciton migration or subjected to redox processes to inject charge carriers, they all are formed from “static” ground electronic states. This presentation will highlight a new avenue of research whereby photoswitchable structural units undergo electrocyclizations leading to subtle but electronically dramatic alterations of pi-electron conjugation topology. This is achieved through the photochemical creation and disruption of local aromatic substructures along the polymer backbone as a way to externally attenuate electronic properties thus providing a way to toggle between two distinct electronic ground states. This presentation will also introduce new prospects for radial topologies and their impact on linear conjugated polymer electronics.

Tunable conjugation topologies for fluxional macromolecular pi-electronics

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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