Recently, the Tianjin Municipal Party Committee held the Tianjin Science and Technology Awards Conference and the Implementation of the City’s Science and Education Talent Action Deployment Conference. At the event, the "High-Performance Molecular Optoelectronic Materials and Devices" project, with Professor Hu Wenping from the School of Science at Tianjin University as the primary contributor, was awarded the Special Prize of the Tianjin Municipal Natural Science Award for 2022.
In the 21st century, the three major themes are information, energy, and health. Molecular optoelectronic materials are new organic polymer materials with semiconductor, conductor, or even superconductor characteristics. These materials can achieve efficient photoelectric and electro-optic conversion, and their advantages include molecular tailoring and synthesis, solution processing, tunable energy bands, and intrinsic flexibility. These properties pave the way for new electronic products that are printable, foldable, and stretchable, offering a significant opportunity for China to leapfrog in innovation, break foreign intellectual property barriers, and achieve groundbreaking technological advancements from 0 to 1. This field is a high ground for innovation and strategic competition globally.
However, several major scientific challenges remain in this field, such as the lack of long-life phosphorescent materials, narrow absorption spectra, difficulty in bipolar charge transport, and low carrier mobility. Professor Hu Wenping's team, starting from molecular engineering, first discovered the phenomenon of photo-induced room temperature phosphorescence and developed several high-performance, long-life room temperature phosphorescent molecules. They proposed the concept of direct arylation polymerization to synthesize high mobility conjugated polymers and designed and synthesized polymer materials with the highest mobility reported internationally at the time. Addressing the limitations of single-component molecular optoelectronic materials, they proposed the new strategy of "organic co-crystals" to develop novel optoelectronic crystal materials through the co-crystallization of two or more molecules. They achieved the first organic co-crystal internationally, providing new ideas and strategies for the development of molecular optoelectronic functional materials. Currently, there are about 113 molecular systems capable of forming co-crystals globally, with Professor Hu's team reporting 37 of them, accounting for over 30%. These original innovative achievements have solved major scientific problems that hinder the development of molecular optoelectronic materials and devices and have received high praise from peers both domestically and internationally. Eight representative papers have been cited 1,484 times in SCI.
Nobel laureate in Chemistry, Professor J. Fraser Stoddart, and Tang Benzhong, a recipient of the National Natural Science First Prize, have praised the work, stating that it "firstly discovered the phenomenon of photo-stimulated room temperature phosphorescence," and that the mobility achieved is "the best in the literature." They also noted the "first realization of D-A co-crystals" and highlighted that "organic co-crystals are artificial model systems," making them "ideal model systems for studying charge separation and transport."
This project is not only of great scientific significance but also has remarkable social benefits. The main participating institutions include Tianjin University, Wuhan University, the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The key contributors to the project are Hu Wenping, Li Zhen, Zhu Daoben, Geng Yanhou, Wang Shirong, Dong Huanli, Xu Wei, Zhang Xiaotao, Zhu Weigang, Yang Jie, Xie Yujun, and Sun Lingjie.
