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22 March 2022 Kristian Lozina, Presse- und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit, JMU Würzburg

The chemistry department in Würzburg aims to develop a new class of chiral organic semiconductors - for next-generation applications in organic electronics. The project is funded by the European Research Council with 1.5 million euros.

We live in an age of miniaturization. The goal: to build even smaller and more efficient optical, electronic and mechanical devices. As a result, there is also an increasing demand for multifunctional materials that can respond to several external stimuli at the same time.

Dr. Prince Ravat, research group leader at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the Julius-Maximilians-University (JMU) Würzburg, is taking up this challenge. He is now receiving top-class support for his project: the European Research Council (ERC) has awarded him a Starting Grant of 1.5 million euros. This grant is awarded in a Europe-wide competition to outstanding young researchers. The project funded from this grant is scheduled to start in the next six months and is designed to run for five years.

Designing, synthesizing and testing materials

The chemists at JMU want to take advantage of chirality. A property of molecules that is related to their symmetry. The introduction of chirality in functional materials endows them with unique properties such as absorption and emission of circularly polarized light and spin-selective charge transport. As a result, materials with entirely new functions can be designed.

"As synthetic chemists, we are interested in developing new molecules with specific applications. In this project, we will design and synthesize novel functional chiral materials and then test their optoelectronic and charge transport properties," Ravat explains.

The JMU team's goal here is to develop chiral organic semiconductors that utilize both charge and spin (self-rotation) of the charge carriers. These are important for developing the next-generation optoelectronics, such as spin LEDs, 3D displays, and quantum-based optical computing. Regular organic semiconductors are already developed and well known, but the research on chiral organic semiconductors is still at an early stage.

Career of the ERC prizewinner

Prince Ravat, was born in 1986 in Vadodara (India), studied chemistry at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (Vadodara, India). He then worked at the National Chemical Laboratory in Pune (India) and the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany, where he received his doctorate with summa cum laude in 2014. Afterwards, he worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Basel (Switzerland) and the University of Tokyo (Japan).

In 2018, Ravat joined JMU within the “Excellent Ideas Programme” and has since been a research group leader at the Institute of Organic Chemistry. In his career, he has already received numerous awards and fellowships – most recently, the Thieme Chemistry Journals Award 2022 and acceptance into the Emil Fischer Fellowship Program in 2021.

Contact for scientific information:

Dr. Prince Ravat, Institute of Organic Chemistry, University of Würzburg, T. +49 931 - 31 81583, princekumar.ravat@uni-wuerzburg.de

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