TY - JOUR
T1 - The Effect of Ring Expansion in Thienobenzo[b]indacenodithiophene Polymers for Organic Field-Effect Transistors.
AU - Chen, Hu
AU - Wadsworth, Andrew
AU - Ma, Chun
AU - Nanni, Alice
AU - Zhang, Weimin
AU - Nikolka, Mark
AU - Luci, Alexander M T
AU - Perdigão, Luís M A
AU - Thorley, Karl J
AU - Cendra, Camila
AU - Larson, Bryon
AU - Rumbles, Garry
AU - Anthopoulos, Thomas D.
AU - Salleo, Alberto
AU - Costantini, Giovanni
AU - Sirringhaus, Henning
AU - McCulloch, Iain
N1 - KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01
Acknowledgements: The authors thank KAUST and BASF for financial support and acknowledge EC FP7 Project SC2 (610115), EC H2020 (643791), and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Projects EP/G037515/1 and EP/M005143/1. M.N. and H.S. acknowledge financial support from the EPSRC though a Programme Grant (EP/M005141/1). G.C. acknowledges financial support from the University of Warwick. A.S. and C.C. gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation, Division of Materials Research,
Award No. 1808401. Use of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, under Contract No. DE-AC02- 76SF00515. The transient microwave conductivity work was funded from the through the Solar Photochemistry Program of Office of Basic Energy Sciences. This work was authored in part by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308. of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308.
PY - 2019/10/15
Y1 - 2019/10/15
N2 - A fused donor, thienobenzo[b]indacenodithiophene (TBIDT), was designed and synthesized using a novel acid-promoted cascade ring closure strategy, and then copolymerized with a benzothiadiazole (BT) monomer. The backbone of TBIDT is an expansion of the well-known indacenodithiophene (IDT) unit and was expected to enhance the charge carrier mobility by improving backbone planarity and facilitating short contacts between polymer chains. However, the optimized field-effect transistors demonstrated an average saturation hole mobility of 0.9 cm2 V-1 s-1, lower than the performance of IDT-BT (∼1.5 cm2 V-1 s-1). Mobilities extracted from time-resolved microwave conductivity measurements were consistent with the trend in hole mobilities in organic field-effect transistor devices. Scanning tunneling microscopy measurements and computational modeling illustrated that TBIDT-BT exhibits a less ordered microstructure in comparison to IDT-BT. This reveals that a regular side-chain packing density, independent of conformational isomers, is critical to avoid local free volume due to irregular packing, which can host trapping impurities. DFT calculations indicated that TBIDT-BT, despite containing a larger, planar unit, showed less stabilization of planar backbone geometries in comparison to IDT-BT. This is due to the reduced electrostatic stabilizing interactions between the peripheral thiophene of the fused core and the BT unit, resulting in a reduction of the barrier to rotation around the single bond. These insights provide a greater understanding of the general structure-property relationships required for semiconducting polymer repeat units to ensure optimal backbone planarization, as illustrated with IDT-type units, guiding the design of novel semiconducting polymers with extended fused backbones for high-performance field-effect transistors.
AB - A fused donor, thienobenzo[b]indacenodithiophene (TBIDT), was designed and synthesized using a novel acid-promoted cascade ring closure strategy, and then copolymerized with a benzothiadiazole (BT) monomer. The backbone of TBIDT is an expansion of the well-known indacenodithiophene (IDT) unit and was expected to enhance the charge carrier mobility by improving backbone planarity and facilitating short contacts between polymer chains. However, the optimized field-effect transistors demonstrated an average saturation hole mobility of 0.9 cm2 V-1 s-1, lower than the performance of IDT-BT (∼1.5 cm2 V-1 s-1). Mobilities extracted from time-resolved microwave conductivity measurements were consistent with the trend in hole mobilities in organic field-effect transistor devices. Scanning tunneling microscopy measurements and computational modeling illustrated that TBIDT-BT exhibits a less ordered microstructure in comparison to IDT-BT. This reveals that a regular side-chain packing density, independent of conformational isomers, is critical to avoid local free volume due to irregular packing, which can host trapping impurities. DFT calculations indicated that TBIDT-BT, despite containing a larger, planar unit, showed less stabilization of planar backbone geometries in comparison to IDT-BT. This is due to the reduced electrostatic stabilizing interactions between the peripheral thiophene of the fused core and the BT unit, resulting in a reduction of the barrier to rotation around the single bond. These insights provide a greater understanding of the general structure-property relationships required for semiconducting polymer repeat units to ensure optimal backbone planarization, as illustrated with IDT-type units, guiding the design of novel semiconducting polymers with extended fused backbones for high-performance field-effect transistors.
UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10754/660425
UR - https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.9b09367
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85075440490&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1021/jacs.9b09367
DO - 10.1021/jacs.9b09367
M3 - Article
C2 - 31613619
SN - 0002-7863
VL - 141
SP - 18806
EP - 18813
JO - Journal of the American Chemical Society
JF - Journal of the American Chemical Society
IS - 47
ER -