Professor Natalie Stingelin

Current research  interests of Natalie Stingelin and her group include micropatterning of organic materials, organic electronics, applied physical chemistry of organic materials, multifunctional inorganic/organic hybrids and advanced optical systems. Establishing interrelationships between performance, processing and materials’ structure and properties are central topic. 

Microfabrication and -Patterning of Organic Materials  Key focus is to explore use of well-defined surfaces, both in terms of their chemical and physical attributes, to study a broad range of interfacial phenomena, for instance, charge transport, crystal growth and cell adhesion. To this end, micro-engineered surface structures are designed and realised that cover a broad spectrum of length-scales and a variety of geometries, and we will further develop current and advance novel micro-structuring methods.  

Organic Electronics  This research concentrates on microfabrication schemes for the manufacture of organic optoelectronic devices, such as field-effect transistors and photovoltaic cells. Particular attention is paid to the creation of model systems with well-defined interfaces and controlled molecular order. The capability to create and tailor organic semiconductors/insulator interfaces will be essential, e.g., to elucidate some of the critical parameters that govern charge transport in organic semiconductors, to advance current technologies and to engineer entirely novel devices.

Applied Physical Chemistry of Organic Materials  Efforts are directed towards the development of high-performance, multifunctional architectures by exploiting the phase behaviour of small molecular organic species and/or polymers. As an example, the phase behaviour of small molecular semi-conductors such as oligoacene systems or arene-perfluoroarene compounds is established and utilized to create novel processing routes for these semiconducting materials. Most recent efforts concentrate, for instance, on the physical chemistry of binaries of organic semiconductors critical to the design of organic photovoltaic cells of high efficiencies.

Multifunctional Inorganic-Organic Hybrids  The principal objectives in this activity are to tailor and create multifunctional inorganic/organic hybrid structures and thin-film architectures that can be readily processed with straight-forward processing schemes. Interests are two-fold. On the one hand, the highly diverse characteristics of inorganic species are combined with the processability of polymers and exploited for the fabrication of novel multi-functional architectures. On the other hand, efforts are devoted to the design and engineering of model materials systems for opto-electronic and magneto-electronic device applications.

Advanced optical systems  Projects have been initiated to develop alternative technologies for the fabrication of multifunctional structures, with emphasis on the manipulation of colour and fabrication of optical filters and high-refractive index coatings. Focus thereby is on the development of photo-chromic species as well as the advancement of microfabrication techniques for the realization of architectures exhibiting structural colours and/or high reflectivity over a selected wavelength regime.