Organic semiconductors (OSCs) have shown considerable promise as active media in flexible, light-weight, low cost, and easily processed electronic devices. While their synthetic tenability provides numerous pathways to readily tune electronic properties for optimization of device characteristics and performance, a major barrier to wide-spread adaptation of OSC-based active layer materials is limited understanding and control over the physicochemical instability of the active layer materials involved. Here, instability is broadly defined as a decrease in material functionality and performance with time and can have mechanistic contributions that range over length scales from chemical bonds to conjugation length to microstructure, particularly in mixed or blended active material layers. In addition to intrinsic active layer material instability, the need for electrical contact to active layers to produce functional devices adds another level of complexity to this problem due to the use of contact materials, chosen for efficient charge harvesting or injection, that are generally quite dissimilar from the active layer materials. Moreover, polarization of these active materials during device performance may also alter degradation rates or open additional degradation pathways. Improvements in organic-based devices will not be possible without a molecular-level understanding of the physical and chemical interactions that drive instability in these hybrid systems. This presentation will highlight specific examples of fundamental studies to elucidate the details of instability of active layer materials at the length scales noted above.

Structure-function-stability nexus in organic electronic materials

ACS Fall 2021

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