Loading...
High performance mechano-optoelectronic molecular switch
Date
2023
Abstract
Highly-efficient molecular photoswitching occurs ex-situ but not to-date inside electronic devices due to quenching of excited states by background interactions. Here we achieve fully reversible in-situ mechano-optoelectronic switching in self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of tetraphenylethylene molecules by bending their supporting electrodes to maximize aggregation-induced emission (AIE). We obtain stable, reversible switching across >1600 on/off cycles with large on/off ratio of (3.8 ± 0.1) × 103 and 140 ± 10 ms switching time which is 10-100× faster than other approaches. Multimodal characterization shows mechanically-controlled emission with UV-light enhancing the Coulomb interaction between the electrons and holes resulting in giant enhancement of molecular conductance. The best mechano-optoelectronic switching occurs in the most concave architecture that reduces ambient single-molecule conformational entropy creating artificially-tightened supramolecular assemblies. The performance can be further improved to achieve ultra-high switching ratio on the order of 105 using tetraphenylethylene derivatives with more AIE-active sites. Our results promise new applications from optimized interplay between mechanical force and optics in soft electronics.
Supervisor
Description
Publisher
Springer
Citation
Nature Communications, 2023, 14, 5639
Collections
Files
Loading...
Cazade_2023_High.pdf
Adobe PDF, 2.69 MB
Funding code
Funding Information
Y.L. acknowledges National Natural Science Foundation of China (22273045), and Independent Scientific Research Plan for Young Investigator of Tsinghua University. D.T. acknowledges Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) for support under Grant Number 12/RC/2275_P2 (SSPC) and for supercomputing resources at the SFI/Higher Education Authority Irish Center for High-End Computing (ICHEC)