Events

SEMS Seminar Series: Professor Mike Turner, University of Manchester

Date: 14 February 2024

Conjugated Polymers of Many Flavours - Short, Long and Round Applications in Imaging and Electronics

Soluble organic semiconductors are attractive synthetic targets as they can be deposited from solution using low-cost processing routes to fabricate organic electronic devices such as light emitting diodes, photovoltaics and field effect transistors. Some of the major challenges for synthetic chemists are to make the syntheses of these materials more efficient, with lower levels of structural defects and higher purities whilst maintaining the solution processing preferably from environmentally benign solvents such as water.

In this contribution several approaches to organic semiconductors will be presented, discussing improved synthetic pathways to existing materials, new avenues to novel materials, and the hierarchy of these structures. The first approach utilises ring opening metathesis polymerization (ROMP) of strained monomers to enable precise control of conjugated polymer molecular weight and to prepare block copolymers and cyclic polymers. The second approach uses C-H activation to avoid the necessity for highly elaborated intermediates in the synthesis of fused ring conjugated oligomers and the final approach discusses the synthesis of conjugated polymer nanoparticles that can be processed from aqueous dispersions into organic electronic devices.

About the Speaker:

Mike Turner obtained BSc and PhD from the University of Bristol, working on the synthesis of new organometallic complexes, before moving to the United States to investigate new routes to polyphosphazenes. He returned to the UK to work at the University of Sheffield on the mechanism of the Fischer-Tropsch reaction and was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to investigate the synthesis of novel polymers. He moved to the University of Manchester in April 2004 to a Chair in Materials Chemistry and to be Director of OMIC.

Updated by: Julien Gautrot