“However, we quickly discovered that things were not that simple.” “We started by thinking that making small tweaks to the structure of the DPP-T4 molecule – achieved by adding or changing the atoms connected to the backbone – would alter the torsion, or twist of the structure, and induce chirality,” Diao said. The study findings are reported in the journal ACS Central Science. Potential applications include solar cells that function like leaves, computers that use quantum states of electrons to compute more efficiently and new imaging techniques that capture three-dimensional information rather than 2D, to name a few. A new study, led by chemical and biomolecular chemistry professor Ying Diao, investigates how well various modifications to a non-chiral polymer called DPP-T4 can be used to form chiral helical structures in polymer-based semiconductor materials. Researchers have been working for decades to mimic nature’s chirality in synthetic molecules. Align image left align image center align image right
