Radical New Materials for Electronics

In recent years, electronic devices made from organic materials have emerged as an exciting alternative to established technologies based on semiconductors like silicon. Such organic materials have the possibility to provide low-cost devices with applications including light-emitting diodes, solar cells, smart cards and radio-frequency ID tags. Commercial products have begun to emerge from this field however to fully realise the potential, new materials and new processing techniques must continue to be developed. Almost all the molecular building blocks currently used in such materials are non-magnetic molecules, however the use of magnetic species (radicals) offers several potential advantages including better-performing transistors with new methods of operation and spintronic devices where the orientation of magnetic moments plays a role in information processing. The project will focus on the study of varying families of magnetic molecules in thin films and devices to understand the potential of such materials in electronic applications and develop devices that exploit their unique properties.