Interplay between Morphology and Electronic Structure in Emergent Organic and pi-d Conjugated Organometal Thin Film Materials

摘要

The demand for multifunctional devices continues to drive the evolution and parametrization of technology. Simultaneously, the breadth of structural, morphological, and electronic information that can be used to study materials widens and grows in complexity. To keep up with the demand for superior technologies in disparate fields, such as energy, electronics, and biotechnology, an unparalleled amount of manpower and financial resources have been devoted to the development of materials that can integrate multiple functionalities, particularly functions that ostensibly exclude one another. To address different functionalities at once, materials have become highly complex and often exhibit multiple structural and morphological phases, hierarchical dependencies, and far-from-equilibrium dynamic structures with little to no long-range atomic ordering. A major area of study that is quickly evolving deals with the quantitative characterization of structure-property-function relationships in complex materials based on pi-conjugated organic and organometal systems-particularly in thin film formulations. In this review, we discuss various research avenues where cleverly engineered self-assembly protocols, as well as characterization methods for probing morphology and electronic structure, are implemented to enable the fabrication of well-defined emergent materials.