Fun with Photons: Using Novel Organic Materials to Navigate Light-Driven Processes

The interaction(s) of light with matter can initiate two processes viz. photophysical and photochemical. Over the years, scientists have created many organic and inorganic molecular systems to study these two processes. Notably, these studies have helped establish fundamental concepts which are still inspiring contemporary scientists to engineer novel materials that can be used for modern photonic applications. Thus, creating novel materials that can absorb photons and transmit or modulate the absorbed energy is critical for the future of photonic devices such as photovoltaic (PV) and Field Effect Transistors (FET) devices. Yet, maximizing the efficiency of current PV and FET devices have attracted many efforts to develop organic materials (with outstanding bandgaps energies), which are not only easy to synthesize, but also easy to handle and process in comparison with inorganic materials. With that in mind, the AJA Lab is developing new organic materials that can be used to upconvert low-energy solar radiation into the spectral region where a typical organic PV device works. Alternatively, our group is engineering organic polymeric materials that can be used to study photochemical and photophysical processes…Thus, we rely on synthetic organic chemistry as well as advanced spectroscopy and crystallography techniques to engineer the organic materials of our interest and to study their behaviors. This presentation will detail recent efforts (from our group) to synthesize novel Polycyclic Aromatic Chromophores (PAC), which exhibit attractive photophysical properties. I will also highlight our work on Anti-Stokes Photoluminescence using the PAC to harvest low-energy photons.