Approaching disorder-tolerant semiconducting polymers

Doping has been widely used to control the charge carrier concentration in organic semiconductors. However, in conjugated polymers, n-doping is often limited by the tradeoff between doping efficiency and charge carrier mobilities, since dopants are often randomly distributed within polymers, leading to significant structural and energetic disorder. Here, we screen a large number of polymer building block combinations and explore the possibility of designing n-type conjugated polymers with good tolerance to dopant-induced disorder. We show that a carefully designed conjugated polymer with a single dominant planar backbone conformation, high torsional barrier at each dihedral angle, and zigzag backbone curvature is highly dopable and can tolerate dopant-induced disorder. With these features, the newly designed diketopyrrolopyrrole (DPP)-based polymer can be efficiently n-doped and exhibit high n-type electrical conductivities over 120 S cm−1, much higher than the reference polymers with similar chemical structures. This work provides a new polymer design concept for highly dopable and highly conductive polymeric semiconductors.

Identifier
Source https://archive.materialscloud.org/record/2021.127
Metadata Access https://archive.materialscloud.org/xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai:materialscloud.org:968
Provenance
Creator Yan, Xinwen; Xiong, Miao; Deng, Xin-Yu; Liu, Kai-Kai; Li, Jia-Tong; Wang, Xue-Qing; Zhang, Song; Prine, Nathaniel; Zhang, Zhuoqiong; Huang, Wanying; Wang, Yishan; Wang, Jie-Yu; Gu, Xiaodan; So, Shu Kong; Zhu, Jia; Lei*, Ting
Publisher Materials Cloud
Publication Year 2021
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess; Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
OpenAccess true
Contact archive(at)materialscloud.org
Representation
Language English
Resource Type Dataset
Discipline Materials Science and Engineering