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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Templating in Polymer-Fullerene Nanocomposites
David G Bucknall
Georgia Institute of Technology
Since their discovery in the mid 1980s, fullerenes have been widely studied and found to possess interesting properties. It is aspects of these properties which a number of scientists are exploring as the fundamental building block to enable quantum information processing (QIP). To realize the concepts for QIP, the functional fullerenes must be arranged in a well-defined morphology, where a number of parameters such as spacing between fullerenes and orientation must be controlled over macroscopic dimensions. We are therefore exploring a number of methods to achieve these defined structures by utilizing self-assembly techniques including the use of block copolymer templating. Among a number of challenges associated with this approach is a careful control of the polymer-fullerene interactions, which have much wider implications than for purely QIP applications, particularly in areas such as the organic photovoltaic devices that utilize fullerenes in the active layer. This talk will outline the work to date on achieving templating of fullerenes in block copolymers, as well as discussing the details of the work we are conducting on understanding polymer-fullerene interaction behaviour using both experimental measurements and computational modeling.
