Design and Applications of Single-Component Radical Conductors

Summary

Organic conducting materials have garnered considerable research attention in material sciences and have shown immense potential in the development of advanced electronic devices. External chemical doping to enable charge-transfer between two different components is regarded as the general way to fabricate organic conductors. However, chemical doping inevitably leads to several challenging issues such as low doping efficiency, doping-induced changes in the microstructure, and poor stability, which limits their application in organic electronics. Developing single-component organic conductors provides an interesting avenue to address those issues and to realize novel applications. As organic materials generally exhibit large band gap and small bandwidth, obtaining a single-component organic conductor is still a critical challenge. Organic radicals can achieve extremely low band gap by chemical modulations, and spin-spin interactions among the radicals can enhance the molecular orbital overlap, which increases the bandwidth and greatly facilitates carrier transport. Consequently, this minireview summarizes the recent progress in the design of single-component radical conductors and their promising applications in organic electronics.