Register for your free place at this talk by email to Clare Drysdale (c.drysdale@imperial.ac.uk). Tea and coffee will be served before the talk at 16.45.
Many everyday electronic devices such as smart phone displays now rely on semiconductors built from organic molecules and polymers. These semiconductors, which are driving the rapidly growing field of plastic electronics, are attractive materials to manufacture as they can be printed onto any surface and have made new products such as rollable displays a possibility.
In this talk I will illustrate how the electronic properties of organic superconductors differ from those of their inorganic counterparts, and how that has required specific engineering and device design. Such properties include low dielectric constants, which leads to the strong binding of excitons and the high luminescence efficiency required by LEDs. I will also consider how photovoltaic solar cells have been designed to maximise the splitting of excitons, ultimately leading to more efficient ways of converting solar energy to electricity.
Biography
Professor Richard Friend, FRS, is the Cavendish Professor of Physics in the University of Cambridge. He has developed the study of organic polymers as semiconductors, and his research group has demonstrated that these materials can be used in wide range of semiconductor devices, including light-emitting diodes and transistors, and solar cells.
He co-founded Cambridge Display Technology Ltd in 1992 to develop light-emitting diode displays and Plastic Logic Ltd in 2000, to develop polymer transistor circuits that are now being developed as flexible active-matrix backplanes for e-paper displays.