| ActivInk(TM) N1200 Featured in Nature Materials |
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8 November 2009 — Researchers at Stanford, PARC, and SSRL use Polyera ActivInkTM N1200 material to study the effects of grain-boundary orientation on charge transport, as published in Nature Materials this week. As it is widely believed that grain boundaries impede carrier transport, efforts have been made to create films with larger grain size. Yet even when grain size approaches that of the device, significant performance variations can be observed, suggesting that even relatively few grain boundaries can have significant effects on charge transport. The article published this week used Polyera's ActivInkTM N1200 (PDI8-CN2) to isolate the effects of the molecular structure at grain boundaries by engineering the microstructure of the material and analyzing the effects on charge transport. Using a wide variety of techniques - including X-ray scattering, first-principle computation, and transistor characterization - the study found that grain-boundary orientation can easily affect charge transport by two orders of magnitude. In particular for ActivInkTM N1200, the molecular packing motif plays a decisive role in charge transport. The results of the study provide important guidelines for designing device-optimized molecular semiconductors. The article can be downloaded from the Nature website. Press Contact: |