Disrupting the TEMPO Paradigm in Radical Conducting Polymers

Radical-containing polymers are ascendant organic electronic materials with potentially advantageous and complementary properties to more established conjugated polymers. Moving from a conjugated chemistry to a radical-based chemistry presents several opportunities, including the creation of intrinsically conductive materials with highly tunable mechanical properties and attractive solution-processing profiles. Despite these advantages, the structure-function and processing-function relationships of radical-containing polymers are only now being investigated in earnest. Moreover, the scope of radical species that have been incorporated into radical polymers remains extremely limited, with extensive reliance on the TEMPO radical. In these respects, radical polymers are closer to where conjugated polymers were in the nineties, before structure-function rules had been established and when the range of conjugated polymer chemistries that had been characterized was extremely narrow. In this talk, I will present the work that my group has been doing in collaboration with this year’s Dillon Medal Recipient, Bryan Boudouris, to computationally characterize next-generation radical materials that disrupt the TEMPO paradigm.