A cross-disciplinary UIUC team has demonstrated a major breakthrough in using automated synthesis to discover new molecules for organic electronics applications. The technology that enabled the discovery relies on an automated platform for rapid molecular synthesis at scale—which is a game-changer in the field of organic electronics and beyond. Using automated synthesis, the team was able to rapidly scan through a library of molecules with precisely defined structures, thereby uncovering, via single-molecule characterization experiments, a new mechanism for high conductance. The work was just reported in Nature Communications and is the first major result to emerge from the Molecule Maker Lab, which is located in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
