Chemical Society Seminar: Zac Hudson - Beyond OLEDs: Emerging Applications of Thermally Activated Delayed Fluorescence
Zoom link: https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/86886750910
Abstract:
Luminescent materials exhibiting thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) are now critical components of many of the most efficient organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) reported. Characterized by both prompt and delayed fluorescence lifetimes, TADF emitters are designed to minimize the energy gap between the lowest singlet and triplet excited states (ΔEST), giving internal quantum efficiencies of up to 100% in OLEDs using purely organic species. While the vast majority of TADF research has focused on OLEDs thus far, new applications for TADF materials are beginning to emerge which take advantage of their unique photophysical properties. This lecture will describe how polymers exhibiting TADF can give luminescent sensors for temperature and oxygen with some of the highest sensitivities known. We also describe how TADF can be used for time-gated biological imaging, providing high contrast by removing the background autofluorescence of the cell. Finally, the design and synthesis of near-infrared TADF emitters and ‘hyperfluorescent’ polymers will be described.
Bio:
Zachary M. Hudson is an Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Chemistry at the University of British Columbia. Zac completed his B.Sc. at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He remained at Queen’s to pursue a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry under the supervision of Prof. Suning Wang, focusing on the development of luminescent materials for organic electronics. During his Ph.D. he also held graduate fellowships at Jilin University in China as well as Nagoya University in Japan. He then moved to the University of Bristol as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Ian Manners, followed by a second Postdoctoral Fellowship at the California Nanosystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara with Prof. Craig Hawker. He joined the faculty at UBC in 2015, where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Sustainable Chemistry. He leads a research program in synthetic materials chemistry, studying topics ranging from solutions for energy-efficient displays and light sources to the self-assembly of electronic materials on the nanoscale. He was the recipient of the CSC Emerging Materials Investigator and ACS Polymer Science and Engineering Young Investigator awards in 2020.