Aviation and space applications can benefit significantly from lightweight organic electronics, now spanning from displays to logics, because of the vital importance of minimising payload (size and mass). It is thus crucial to assess the damage caused to such materials by cosmic rays and neutrons, which pose a variety of hazards through atomic displacements following neutron-nucleus collisions. Here we report the first study of the neutron radiation tolerance of two poly(thiophene)s-based organic semiconductors: poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl), P3HT, and the liquid-crystalline poly(2,5-bis (3-tetradecylthiophen-2-yl)thieno[3,2-b]thiophene), PBTTT. We combine spectroscopic investigations with characterisation of intrinsic charge mobility to show that PBTTT exhibits significantly higher tolerance than P3HT. We explain this in terms of a superior chemical, structural and conformational stability of PBTTT, which can be ascribed to its higher crystallinity, in turn induced by a combination of molecular design features. Our approach can be used to develop design strategies for better neutron radiation-tolerant materials, thus paving the way for organic semiconductors to enter avionics and space applications.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 5. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 01 August 2023.
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#9,868,570
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#64,620
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#134,102
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Outputs of similar age from Scientific Reports
#1,658
of 4,185 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 33,982,974 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 70th percentile.
So far Altmetric has tracked 181,969 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 18.1. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 64% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 4,185 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 60% of its contemporaries.
