research

Conjugated Polymers

Conjugated polymers are fascinating materials, which can show metal-like conduction, and yet can be processed as polymers. These polymers are gaining an increasingly important place in industry, as versatile components of a new generation of electronic and photonic materials.

What would be especially attractive is to create conjugated polymers which are able to undergo self-assembly into ordered patterns. This can lead to a very economical method to construct new electronic devices on the nanometric scale, merely by bringing together the component structures. Our laboratory is investigating the use of the ring-opening metathesis polymerization reaction (ROMP) to achieve this objective.

This reaction gives access to a new class of conjugated polymers and block copolymers which have particularly attractive features:

(i) Significantly improved solubility
(ii) Low band gaps (corresponding to high electron mobility along the polymer chain)
(iii) Many possibilities of functionalization, with both organic and inorganic groups
(iv) Spontaneous self-assembly of the block copolymers into nanoscale morphologies. Shown below are transmission electron micrographs of spherical aggregates which contain these conjugated polymers.

Thus, using this methodology, we can construct polymers with unique optical and/or electronic applications. This project provides expertise in organic synthesis, metal-catalysis, as well as polymer synthesis and characterization.

H. Bazzi, H. F. Sleiman*; "Synthesis and Self Assembly of Conjugated Polymer Precursors Containing Dichlorocarbonate Groups by Living Ring-Opening Metathesis Polymerization", Macromolecules, 2002, 35, 624-629. (Full paper), pdf