Polymer materials with easily tunable electrical conductivity, especially those exhibiting superconducting properties at room temperature, could revolutionize our daily lives by contributing to energy savings as well as enabling more efficient and widespread energy production. This could be achieved through flexible and portable photovoltaic and thermoelectric systems for effective thermal energy harvesting or the development of energy-efficient molecular electronics.
While conventional conductive (metallic) or semiconducting materials typically exhibit isotropic conductivity, properly designed polymer materials could enable the formation of ultrathin layers on the nanometer scale with anisotropic conductivity, allowing for efficient transport of charge carriers or phonons only in a desired direction. These properties, crucial for the construction of next-generation photovoltaic systems and other optoelectronic devices, can be achieved in polymer brushes consisting of stretched macromolecules attached to a selected surface by only one end.
However, standard polymerization methods are not compatible with the growth of conjugated, conductive polymer chains on surfaces, which would provide the required electrical properties. Therefore, this project aims to develop advanced synthesis methodologies and polymerization techniques to create complex polymer brush architectures (e.g., ladder-like structures), enabling the fabrication of thin polymer layers with the desired (semi)(photo)conductivity.
The resulting brushes will be thoroughly examined in terms of their structural and electronic properties. Additionally, the project will explore the synthesis of one-dimensional superconducting systems, which were theoretically proposed 60 years ago but remain experimentally challenging and have not yet been successfully tested.
