Soft Matter Physics • Physik weicher Materie
The term “Physics of Soft Matter”, in particular of thin layers of polymeric semiconductors and photoactive polymers, seems to be contradictory by its own. Physics is known to be the most precise of the natural sciences, with the goal to extract general laws and rules from experimental and theoretical work on well defined systems. In contrast, polymer layers mostly exhibit a complex hierarchical structure. As a consequence, most of the physical properties of these layers such as charge carrier conductivity, electronic bandgap, optical anisotropy etc. vary in lateral and vertical dimensions throughout the layer. Moreover, the specific structure of a layer is largely determined by both the exact chemical structure of the used polymers as well as by the preparation conditions, which makes it difficult to identify general rules for a specific class of materials.
The group of Prof. Neher at the University of Potsdam uses three main approaches to study and to understand these complex systems:
- Correlation between specific physical properties and well-adjustable chemical modifications of the polymers thus as the nature of side-chains and the molecular weight. This approach is performed in cooperation with well-known polymer chemists such as Prof. Scherf in Wuppertal and Prof. Bunz in Atlanta (USA).
- Define the morphology of the layer. In particular, this refers to the recent approaches to control the alignment of polymers in thin layers as well as to adjust the dimensions of phases in polymer blends.
- Measurement of physical properties with high spatial resolution or over a wide range in time. This includes investigations with scanning probe microscopy methods as well as time resolved optical and electrooptical experiments.
Most of the work of the “Soft Matter Physics” group has been published in highly-recognized journals such as Advanced Materials, Applied Physics Letters, Macromolecules, Nature Materials and Physical Review.
To learn more about recent publications of the group, please see the section Publications.
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