Breakthrough polymer research

STARKVILLE, Miss. – A Mississippi State Bagley College of Engineering and Swalm School of Chemical Engineering faculty member and graduate student are part of a multi-institutional team that is reporting a breakthrough in advanced materials research. Neeraj Rai, MSU assistant professor of chemical engineering, and Md Abdus Sabuj, chemical engineering doctoral student are among authors of “A high-spin ground-state donor-acceptor conjugated polymer,” published in a recent issue of Science Advances. The article is available online at https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaav2336/tab-pdf. Rai said the team designed a polymer that has a triplet electronic state, or two unpaired electrons, as the ground state and is stable under ambient conditions. “This is an important breakthrough as most organic molecules and polymers have a singlet electronic state where all electrons are paired - spin-up and spin-down,” Rai said. The research is relevant because of a growing need “to design materials that deviate from the traditional chemical bonding paradigm” that will revolutionize the field of material science, Rai said. These materials exhibit distinct optical, electronic, spin and excited-state properties, which have structure and dynamics, and that can be optimized for applications in organic electronics, spintronics, nonlinear optics, and energy conversion and storage. (Source: Mississippi State University 07/09/19)