Conjugated polymers articles from across Nature Portfolio

Thermoelectric devices have received significant attention for energy generation owing to their unique advantages over traditional heat engines. Here, the authors developed a well performing stretchable and self-healable iono thermoelectric material by optimizing the thermophoresis of protons in a polymer complex PEDOT:PAAMPSA:PA polymer.

Elongation of acenes with linearly fused benzene rings is a synthetic challenge. Now, the use of a metal–organic framework enables the synthesis of polymeric precursors, which undergo thermal transformation to form polyacenes.

Fullerene acceptors typically suffer from undesirable segregation and dimerization. Here, the authors report a poly(fullerene-alt-xylene) acceptor as guest component to facilitate charge transfer and suppress charge recombination, achieving efficiency of 18% for ternary all-polymer solar cells.

We review our recent studies in which the optical functions of monomers and π-conjugated polymers are precisely controlled based on flexible heteroatom-containing complexes. The combination of heteroatoms, such as boron, nitrogen, oxygen, and fluorine, creates slightly bent and asymmetric structures against π-surfaces, which induce bending motion in the excited state, providing solid-state luminescence and stimuli-responsive properties. Furthermore, the structures enable π-conjugation to be extended, and the optical functions are finely tuned by polymerization, which restricts the flexibility along the polymer main chain. Our strategy provides novel insights for the development of π-conjugated polymers showing unprecedented functionalities.

Distannylated dithiazologermole and germaindacenodithiazole were copolymerized with dibrominated benzothiadiazole and di(thiazolyl)benzothiadiazole to produce four new donor-acceptor conjugated copolymers. The optical, electrochemical, and thermal properties of the copolymers were characterized. DFT calculations revealed that these thiazole-containing copolymers possessed lower HOMOs and LUMOs than those of thiophene-based congeners, in accordance with the experimental results. The intramolecular noncovalent S‒N and N‒H bond interactions and the effects of the bridging atom (C or Ge) on the HOMO and LUMO energy levels were also suggested by the DFT calculations.

The feasibility of using strongly electron-deficient naphthobispyrazine bisimide (NPI) as a building unit for n-type semiconducting polymers used in all-polymer organic photovoltaics (OPV) cells was investigated. The NPI-based polymers had sufficiently deep LUMO energy levels of ~−3.7 eV and narrow bandgaps of less than 1.5 eV, which matched well energetically with p-type polymers exhibiting wide optical bandgaps. The NPI-based polymers exhibited a clear photoresponse in all-polymer OPV cells blended with PTB7-Th as a benchmark p-type polymer and showed power conversion efficiencies of up to 1.6%.