Automated synthesis allows for discovery of unexpected charge transport behavior in organic molecules
A cross-disciplinary UIUC team has demonstrated a major breakthrough in using automated synthesis to discover new molecules for organic electronics applications.
The technology that enabled the discovery relies on an automated platform for rapid molecular synthesis at scale — which is a game-changer in the field of organic electronics and beyond. Using automated synthesis, the team was able to rapidly scan through a library of molecules with precisely defined structures, thereby uncovering, via single-molecule characterization experiments, a new mechanism for high conductance. The work was just reported in Nature Communications and is the first major result to emerge from the Molecule Maker Lab, which is located in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The unexpectedly high conductance was uncovered in experiments led by Charles M. Schroeder, who is the James Economy Professor in materials science & engineering and a professor in chemical & biomolecular engineering. The project’s goal was to seek out new molecules with strong conductivity that might be suitable for use in molecular electronics or organic electronics applications. The team’s approach was to systematically append many different side chains to molecular backbones to understand how the side chains affected conductance.
The first stage of the project consisted of synthesizing a large library of molecules to be characterized using single-molecule electronics experiments. If the synthesis had been done with conventional methods, it would have been a long, cumbersome process. That effort was avoided through use of the Molecule Maker Lab’s automated synthesis platform, which was designed to facilitate molecular discovery research that requires testing of large numbers of candidate molecules.
Edward R. Jira, a Ph.D. student in chemical & biomolecular engineering who had a leading role in the project, explained the synthesis platform’s concept. “What’s really powerful… is that it leverages a building-block-based strategy where all of the chemical functionality that we’re interested in is pre-encoded in building blocks that are bench-stable, and you can have a large library of them sitting on a shelf,” he said. A single type of reaction is used repeatedly to couple the building blocks together as needed, and “because we have this diverse building block library that encodes a lot of different functionality, we can access a huge array of different structures for different applications.”
As Schroeder put it, “Imagine snapping Legos together.”
Co-author Martin D. Burke extended the Lego-brick analogy to explain why the synthesizer was so valuable to the experiments — and it wasn’t only because of the rapid production of the initial molecular library. “Because of the Lego-like approach for making these molecules, the team was able to understand why they are super-fast,” he explained. Once the surprisingly fast state was discovered, “using the ‘Legos,’ we could take the molecules apart piece by piece, and swap in different ‘Lego’ bricks — and thereby systematically understand the structure/function relationships that led to this ultrafast conductivity.” More