Molecular Nano-Architectures for Energy and Electronics

Since the discovery of conducting polymers, organic materials have promised great applications in energy conversion, electronics, and chemical sensing. Synthetic chemistry has been rapidly advancing the development of organic materials with desired properties and functions. At the core of the research is understanding the structure-property relationships and developing new chemical structures and synthetic methods. In this talk, I will present several design principles of functional organic materials based on the concept of molecular nano-architectures. First, I will introduce molecular contortion as a new design motif for novel electronic materials. These molecules include helical molecular ribbons and conjugated macrocycles, which showed good performance in solar cells, photodetectors, gas sensors, etc. The chemical principles underlying the molecular design will be discussed. Second, I will introduce a new synthetic approach to synthesizing monolayer two-dimensional polymers (also known as 2D-MOFs and 2D-COFs) on a large scale. These 2D polymer films can serve as the thinnest semipermeable membranes for osmotic power generation. Furthermore, I will show the programmed assembly of hybrid organic-inorganic 2D heterostructures with atomic precision. This approach allows for integrating versatile molecular building blocks into ultrathin films for the development of 2D electronics.