Importance Of Organic Polymers

Organics polymers are emerging materials in various optical and optoelectronic applications due to their superior properties over conventional inorganic materials. For example, devices made out of organic polymers can be flexible, have better mechanical stability on impact, light weight and significantly effective in the cost of manufacturing. Due to these alluring properties, organic polymers are becoming extremely important in applications such as transparent/flexible optoelectronics, photovoltaics, field-effect transistors, sensors, lasers and visible LEDs. In majority of these applications, potential use of organic polymers is in the form of anti-reflective coatings, optical adhesives, substrates, and micro lenses. The critical property necessary for such applications is the high refractive index (RI) of the material. However, typical carbon based polymers have low RI values which limits the use of these polymers in the aforementioned applications. Thus, organic polymers with higher RI values, typically greater than 1.8, have attracted considerable interest in …show more content…
1b). However, to obtain high RI polymers, we have to include highly polarizable moieties without affecting the number density of the polymers. We select polyimides as a model polymer and create novel polyimides by incorporating highly polarizable functional groups into the polymer backbone. Polyimides have attracted much attention due their exceptional thermal stability and ease of processability. Further, polyimides possess mechanical stability, good flexibility, flame resistance, radiation resistance and low dielectric constant, thus holding great promises for optoelectronic applications. However, these polymers have low RI values which the limit the use in these applications. In this work, we identify novel polyimide candidates with high RI values using the above mentioned