Pirkey Endowed Seminar: Michael Chabinyc, University of California Santa Barbara

The Department welcomes our Pirkey Endowed Seminar speaker, Michael Chabinyc, University of California Santa Barbara. Dr. Chabinyc’s seminar is titled “Moving Charges in Semiconducting Polymers”.

Organic semiconductors are candidates for next-generation thin film electronics in applications ranging from displays to energy conversion devices. Controlling the electrical doping of semiconducting polymers presents an important challenge towards achieving these goals. Intrinsic semiconducting polymers have low dielectric constants, whereas heavily doped materials are effectively organic salts. Understanding this transition between the two states is complex because of the disordered microstructure in polymers. Examination of semicrystalline polymers across length scales using synchrotron-based X-ray scattering methods reveals that the ordering of domains plays the largest factor in electrical transport. In-situ experiments reveal how doping occurs within the amorphous and ordered domains in semiconducting polymers. We find that the doping process of polymers is strongly affected by the preference of counter ions to reside in either ordered or amorphous domains. These studies suggest pathways for molecular design of materials for next generation thermoelectrics, bioelectronics and neuromorphic electronics.

Professor Michael Chabinyc is Chair of the Materials Department at the University of California Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in chemistry from Stanford University and was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. He was a Member of Research Staff at (Xerox) PARC prior to joining UCSB in 2008. His research group studies fundamental properties of organic semiconducting materials and thin film inorganic semiconductors with a focus on materials useful for energy conversion. He has authored more than 200 papers across a range of topics and is inventor on more than 40 patents in the area of thin film electronics. In 2019, he was elected to be a fellow of the Materials Research Society, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.