Plastics (polymers) and other organic materials are typically thought of as insulating materials that surround conducting metals (e.g. copper) to protect us from shocks. However, through careful design, a class of so-called “pi-conjugated” organic compounds and polymers can be both semiconducting and conducting, and can be processed as flexible and in some cases stretchable thin films. In addition, these materials can be tuned to absorb and emit light across the visible spectrum. These pi-conjugated materials have been incorporated into devices such as organic light emitting diode (OLED) based displays common in cell phones (e.g. Samsung phones and the iPhone X) and now televisions (LG). OLEDs are now a multi-billion dollar market (> $10 billion expected in 2018), that is forecasted to grow rapidly over the next decade. OLEDs are now under active development for a variety of high efficiency light applications, with high-end lumenaires being marketed by a variety of companies. In addition, these materials have found use in organic solar cells, and also as components in a new class of highly efficient “perovskite” solar cells.
In this presentation, Professor Seth Marder, Visitor to Oxford Martin Senior Fellow, Professor Henry Snaith, will provide a brief introduction to how chemists develop these materials, introduce the basic working concepts of OLEDs and photovoltaics, show how organic compounds have been used in these technologies, and touch on both the strengths and weaknesses of organic materials for these various applications.
About the speaker
Seth Marder is currently the Georgia Power Chair of Energy Efficiency and Regents’ Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering (courtesy) at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Professor Marder received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985. After completing his postdoctoral work at the University of Oxford from 1985 - 1987, he moved to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Marder has served on numerous advisory boards for journals and is the Founding Chair of the Editorial Board for the Royal Society of Chemistry flagship materials journal, Materials Horizons.
He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2003), the Optical Society of America (2004), SPIE (2006), the Royal Society of Chemistry (2007), the American Physical Society (2009) the Materials Research Society (2014) and The National Academy of Inventors (2016). He received a American Chemical Society A.C. Cope Scholar Award, and the MRS Mid-Career Award. He was recently Awarded Georgia Tech’s Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award - Georgia Tech highest recognition for a faculty member.