Recent Advance in the Development of Singlet-Fission-Capable Polymeric Materials.

Singlet fission (SF) is a spin-allowed process in which a higher-energy singlet exciton is converted into two lower-energy triplet excitons via a triplet pair intermediate state. Implementing SF in photovoltaic devices holds the potential to exceed the Shockley-Queisser limit of conventional single-junction solar cells. Although great progress has been made in exploiting the underlying mechanism of SF over the past decades, the scope of materials capable of SF, particularly polymeric materials, remains poor. SF-capable polymer is one of the most potential candidates in the implementation of SF into devices due to their distinct superiorities in flexibility, solution processability and self-assembly behavior. Notably, recent advancements have demonstrated high-performance SF in isolated donor-acceptor (D-A) copolymer chains. This review provides an overview of recent progress in the development of SF-capable polymeric materials, with a significant focus on elucidating the mechanisms of SF in polymers and optimizing the design strategies for SF-capable polymers. Additionally, the paper discusses the challenges encountered in this field and presents future perspectives. It is expected that this comprehensive review will offer valuable insights into the design of novel SF-capable polymeric materials, further advancing the potential for SF implementation in photovoltaic devices.

A mobile precursor determines protein resistance on nanostructured surfaces.

Biomaterials are often engineered with nanostructured surfaces to control interactions with proteins and thus regulate their biofunctions. However, the mechanism of how nanostructured surfaces resist or attract proteins together with the underlying design rules remains poorly understood at a molecular level, greatly limiting attempts to develop high-performance biomaterials and devices through the rational design of nanostructures. Here, we study the dynamics of nonspecific protein adsorption on block copolymer nanostructures of varying adhesive domain areas in a resistant matrix. Using surface plasmon resonance and single molecule tracking techniques, we show that weakly adsorbed proteins with two-dimensional diffusivity are critical precursors to protein resistance on nanostructured surfaces. The adhesive domain areas must be more than tens or hundreds of times those of the protein footprints to slow down the 2D-mobility of the precursor proteins for their irreversible adsorption. This precursor model can be used to quantitatively analyze the kinetics of nonspecific protein adsorption on nanostructured surfaces. Our method is applicable to precisely manipulate protein adsorption and resistance on various nanostructured surfaces, e.g., amphiphilic, low-surface-energy, and charged nanostructures, for the design of protein-compatible materials.

Molecular length dictates the nature of charge carriers in single-molecule junctions of oxidized oligothiophenes.

To develop advanced materials for electronic devices, it is of utmost importance to design organic building blocks with tunable functionality and to study their properties at the molecular level. For organic electronic and photovoltaic applications, the ability to vary the nature of charge carriers and so create either electron donors or acceptors is critical. Here we demonstrate that charge carriers in single-molecule junctions can be tuned within a family of molecules that contain electron-deficient thiophene-1,1-dioxide (TDO) building blocks. Oligomers of TDO were designed to increase electron affinity and maintain delocalized frontier orbitals while significantly decreasing the transport gap. Through thermopower measurements we show that the dominant charge carriers change from holes to electrons as the number of TDO units is increased. This results in a unique system in which the charge carrier depends on the backbone length, and provides a new means to tune p- and n-type transport in organic materials.