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Organic semiconductor spintronics: Utilising triplet excitons in organic electronics.

15 - 16 September 2014 09:00 - 17:00

Scientific discussion meeting organised by Professor Andrew Monkman and Professor Sir Richard Friend FREng FRS

Event details

Organic electronics now supports a rapidly growing industry, including organic light-emitting diode, OLED, displays as used in cell phone displays and up-market TVs.  This has been enabled both by successful engineering of materials and devices, and also, through the design of new device architectures that allow control of electron spin.  This is a rapidly moving field, and some recent advances in the basic semiconductor science are likely to enable new applications.

This meeting will focus on the role of the spin state of the bound electron-hole pairs (excitons) that provide light emission in LEDs or separate to give free charge in solar cells.  It is centred on two recent developments.  Using materials engineered to reduce the spin exchange energy, spin triplet excitons can be harnessed for efficient light generation in LEDs.  Conversely, large exchange energies can allow splitting of singlet excitons to pairs of spin-entangled triplet excitons that can be harnessed in solar cell architectures that may exceed the single-junction Shockley-Queisser limit.

View the draft meeting programme

Biographies of the organisers and speakers will be made available shortly. The recorded audio of the presentations can be found below, and the papers relating to the meeting have been published in Philosophical Transactions A.

Attending this event

This event is intended for researchers in relevant fields and is free to attend. There are a limited number of places and registration is essential. An optional lunch is offered and should be booked during registration (all major credit cards accepted).

Enquiries: Contact the events team

Organisers

  • Professor Andrew Monkman, University of Durham, UK

    Biography not yet available.

  • Professor Sir Richard Friend FREng FRS, University of Cambridge, UK

    Richard Friend holds the Cavendish Professorship of Physics at the University of Cambridge. His research encompasses the physics, materials science and engineering of carbon-based semiconductors, particularly polymers. His research advances have shown that these have significant applications in LEDs, solar cells and FETs. These findings have been important both for fundamental science, because they reveal new regimes and models for semiconductor behaviour, and for real applications that have been developed and exploited through a number of university spin-off companies. The first of these, Cambridge Display Technology, now part of the Sumitomo Chemical Company, developed fully printable organic LEDs for use in high resolution displays that are now commercialized and used in current OLED displays. His current research interests are directed to novel schemes – including ideas inspired by recent insights into Nature’s light harvesting – that seek to understand and improve the performance and cost of solar cells.