The Effect of Ring Expansion in Thienobenzo[b]indacenodithiophene Polymers for Organic Field-Effect Transistors.
Type
ArticleAuthors
Chen, Hu
Wadsworth, Andrew

Ma, Chun
Nanni, Alice
Zhang, Weimin
Nikolka, Mark
Luci, Alexander M T
Perdigão, Luís M A
Thorley, Karl J
Cendra, Camila
Larson, Bryon
Rumbles, Garry

Anthopoulos, Thomas D.

Salleo, Alberto
Costantini, Giovanni

Sirringhaus, Henning
McCulloch, Iain

KAUST Department
Chemical Science ProgramKAUST Solar Center (KSC)
Material Science and Engineering Program
Physical Science and Engineering (PSE) Division
Date
2019-10-15Online Publication Date
2019-10-15Print Publication Date
2019-11-27Embargo End Date
2020-10-16Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/660425
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
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.Citation
Chen, H., Wadsworth, A., Ma, C., Nanni, A., Zhang, W., Nikolka, M., … McCulloch, I. (2019). The Effect of Ring Expansion in Thienobenzo[b]indacenodithiophene Polymers for Organic Field-Effect Transistors. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 141(47), 18806–18813. doi:10.1021/jacs.9b09367Sponsors
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.Publisher
American Chemical Society (ACS)Additional Links
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.9b09367ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1021/jacs.9b09367