Eliot Woods
Northwestern
Conjugated polymers (CP) are potentially useful in electronic applications where weight or flexibility are important. The dominant paradigm of step-growth polymerization does not allow for sequence or architecture control, limiting the potential of these materials. Catalyst transfer polycondensation enables a chain growth mechanism, but expanding to new monomer types remains a challenge. Using a mechanistically distinct approach, we aim to use substrate photoexcitation to achieve chain growth by taking advantage of the inherent photophysical properties of CP. We hypothesize that the inherent red-shifted absorption of CPs, relative to their monomers, will allow selective excitation of growing chains over free monomers. Our method uses commercially available nickel catalysts for both Heck and Suzuki-Miyaura type coupling of aryl iodides using visible light. Preliminary polymerization studies have produced oligomers of polyfluorene and polyphenylenevinylene.