04/2016

Pi-conjugated semiconducting polymers have attracted much interest in recent years because of their utility in flexible electronic devices including for use in organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and organic photovoltaics (OPVs).

However, the synthesis of these materials remain challenging in that their molecular weights are difficult to control and their molecular weight distributions tend to be large. These limitations mean that the the materials are difficult to synthesize in a reproducible manner.

In this work from the Luscombe group, we report the first use of CH-activation to produce a monomer that can then be used in a living polymerization to synthesize pi-conjugated polymers in a highly controlled manner.