High Conductivity N-doped Polymers

11/30/2020 | Seth Marder and Carlos Silva (Georgia Tech.)

The Marder/Silva groups have been collaborating with Jian Pei’s group at Peking University on understanding the role of dopant on the electrical and thermal conductivities of n-dopable polymers.

Photonic Funnels

10/21/2020

Efficient optical coupling between nano- and macroscale areas is strongly suppressed by the diffraction limit. This work presents a possible solution to this fundamental problem via the experimental fabrication, characterization, and comprehensive theoretical analysis of structures referred to as ‘photonic funnels’.

Excitons and Polarons in Organic Materials

10/20/2020

In this effort, the DMREF team has developed a new theory for deciphering the features of the optical absorption spectra of conjugated polymers and organic aggregates.

Tunable Structural Color of Bottlebrush Block Copolymers via 3D Printing

10/19/2020 | Charles Sing, Ying Diao, Damien Guironnet, Simon Ro

Mimicking the brilliant structure-based coloration of chameleons, butterflies, and opal requires creation of highly ordered layered structures at length scales a thousand times thinner than a human hair

Designing the World’s Brightest Fluorescent Materials

8/11/2020 | Krishnan Raghavachari and Amar Flood

The brightest fluorescent material has been created, solving a problem that’s persisted in the field for more than a century. While fluorescent dyes are potential key components of materials needed for applications including efficient solar cells, medical diagnostics, and organic light emitting diodes (LEDs), electronic coupling between them in the solid state quenches their emission. Small-molecule Ionic Isolation Lattices (SMILES) provide a solution to this long-standing problem.

Chemically-Responsive Liquid Crystals

6/16/2020 | Nicholas L. Abbott, Manos Mavrikakis, Robert J. Twieg

A collaborative team of computational researchers, chemists and chemical engineers has shown that it is possible to exploit reactions on metal surfaces to change the optical properties of organic materials, thus providing new ways to report specific surface reactions.

Color, Structure, and Rheology of a Bottlebrush Copolymer Solution

6/7/2020

A combination of high-end microscopy, rheology, and neutron scattering was used to show how the shear rate alters the structure and color of these bottlebrush polymer

Designing Exceptional Gas-separation Membranes with Machine Learning

6/4/2020 | B. Benicewicz (U. SC) and S. Kumar (Columbia)

The field of polymer membrane design is primarily based on empirical observation, which limits discovery of new materials optimized for separating a given gas pair. Instead of relying on exhaustive experimental investigations, this team has trained a machine learning algorithm, through use of a topological, path-based hash of the polymer repeating unit.

SrNbO3 as Transparent Conductor in the Visible and UV

6/1/2020

It has been a long-standing challenge to find a material that combines the mutually exclusive properties of high electrical conductivity and high optical transmission in the visible, and even harder, in the ultraviolet spectrum. A new class of transparent conductors – correlated metals – was recently discovered and found suitable.

Conformationally Directed Assemblies of Peptides on 2D Surfaces

4/3/2020 | Rene Overney and Mehmet Sarikaya

In this complementary experimental and computational study, the directed assembly of genetically selected graphite binding peptides on 2D solid surfaces is demonstrated. Structural and kinetic analyses as well as molecular dynamics simulations yield the self-assembly process as thermally controllable upon tuning the solvated peptide conformational states.

Research Highlights