The Collins group has successfully published a manuscript with George Malliaras’ group at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines in Nature Communications. The work reveals how nanostructure can individually govern both ionic and electronic properties in the transparent and flexible polymer-based conductor known as PEDOT:PSS. Used in antistatic coatings, it also is biocompatible and has been shown to be of potential use in biointerfacing of electronic devices.

Qun Lu has successfully defended his masters project and obtained his degree from the physics program at WSU. His thesis “Separating annealing effects on organic solar cells based on combined solar simulator and quantum efficiency measurement” has established these state of the art fully automated in-situ measurements for our lab.

Thomas Ferron presented his first talk at the American Physical Society March Meeting in Baltimore, MD this past week along with a talk presented by Brian Collins. Thomas’ talk entitled “Spectral analysis of resonant scattering to quantify phase behavior in organic blends” was presented in the Focus Session: Polymers for Solar Energy Conversion on Wednesday morning.

Brian has been accepted into the Department of Chemistry as an affiliate faculty. The Collins Research Group can now involve students from physics, materials science, and chemistry.

A computational study probing how different morphologies can result in anisotropic scattering from isotropic films has been published in the Journal of Synchrotron Radiation entitled “Origins of polarization-dependent anisotropic X-ray scattering from organic thin films.” This work will enable definitive interpretations of X-ray scattering experiments on our films based on conjugated polymers toward quantitative measurements of molecular orientation within nanostructures.

Prof Collins has been invited to present “Resonant X-ray techniques revealing how nano-to-mesoscale structure in organic materials determines optoelectronic properties” at this year’s Pacific Northwest AVS Meeting at Mount Hood, Oregon on October 2nd.

Matthew Waldrip won a competitive application for summer research support in the Collins Lab. His proposal is to develop fast field switching inside an organic solar cell beyond RC constraints to achieve ~10ns resolution in Time-Dependent Collection Field measurements.

Matthew Waldrip has received the Auvil Scholars Fellowship as an outstanding student at Washington State University

The Collins Lab has been awarded the WSU New Faculty Seed Grant through the internal competition process. This grant funds the work of one graduate student throughout two academic semesters toward the goal of acquiring initial data for extramural grants. The project is to develop initial results on orientation-dependent optical models of polymer molecules to quantitatively measure molecular orientation and conformation in thin film nanostructures.