Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences
Tohoku University

Development of organic electronics, that is breaking away from scarce resources, is one of the most important subjects in human society. Although organic semiconductors have many advantages such as sustainability, solution-processability, and flexibility over inorganic counterparts, their low mobility has been a heavy drawback. While doping, adding a small amount of charge carrier, has been widely used to overcome this issue, dopants possess the risk of distorting crystallinity, preventing conduction, and spreading themselves that often cause serious performance and stability lowering.

A dopant having a similar molecular structure to a semiconducting molecule but different number of electrons is a possible candidate to bring about breakthroughs in organic electronics. Such unique structural relationship could allow a higher portion of dopant to be added, induce an efficient doping without crystallinity decreasing, and thereby give higher conductivity and wider Fermi level controllability to the materials. In addition, their basic physico-chemical properties could be precisely tuned by further chemical functionalization, which is a big advantage of organic molecules. Aim of this study is to design, synthesize, and utilize such unique molecules as "Widely Fermi Level Tunable Organic Semiconductors.