That’s it. I am no longer a chemist.

So… yeah. Anyone wanna teach me geology or something?

Just a heads up that I’ll be in Boston this Thursday-Sunday for the ACS Organic Division GRS. If you’re going, come say hi. I’ll have a poster with science on it on Friday.

Less likely given our readership, but I’ll also be at the American Crystallographic Association’s Chicago meeting July 24-29. Again, come say hi if you’re going. The plenary lecture will be given by last year’s Chemistry Nobel Prize winners, all of whom happen to be crystallographers.

And now back to your regularly scheduled blog.

EDIT: Here, read this

My friend bought an air stirrer for his new lab, and it’s a damn good thing he read the manual beforehand:

Whatever that tool is, KEEP IT THE HELL AWAY FROM ME. And if you have to use it, um, wear a cup.

See the cute little devices below?  These are my first OFETs!  That means I’m learning my way around a completely different type of device.  And that doesn’t happen overnight.  Nonono.  That takes time and patience and a lot of fuckups.  I’m lucky in that I’m already intimately familiar with spincasting and that our probe station* is pretty user-friendly.

Something interesting I noticed when I pulled the camera out: without the flash on, all you can see is the shiny blue of the SiO₂ on Si substrate…the lovely organic film on top of it GLOWS LIKE CRAZY under camera flash, though!

My first impressions of OFET work?  I like them. They’re shiny!

*(giggle)

…so here is another.  In situ fullerene formation from a flake of graphene!  It’s uncertain whether this is the mechanism for fullerene formation in conventional production methods, but clearly it works in the TEM!  The paper is brief and interesting.  Go read it, y’all.

You don’t want to see my inner environmentalist start ranting about the giant oil spill in the Gulf.  My ranting tends to fall into the tl;dr category, so I am remaining (angrily) quiet.[1]

However, seeing people try to develop solutions to this mess makes me a little less angry.  Case in point:

Score another for science, y’all.

[1] …on the blog.  This is why I also refrain from written commentary about coal mining accidents.[2]

[2] Scroll to “1990″ on the third page linked.  (RIP, Uncle Mark.)

My boyfriend works with thiols, and I happened to walk by his hood one day and was strickened with the muse! …and nausea. Mostly nausea. But it did provide me with the inspiration for the following, based off of Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” Now I call him Captain Mercaptan, which he does not appreciate.

---

O Captain! Mercaptan! Your fearful prep is done;
The lab has weathered every rot, the prize you sought is won;
The paper’s near, the lauds I hear, reviewers all exulting,
While follow nose the steady smell, aroma grim and daring,
     But O heart! heart! heart!
          O the taste of vomit up,
               Where on the bench your thiol lies,
                    Smelling like a butt.

O Captain! Mercaptan! Wise up and fear the smells;
Wise up – for you alarms are rung – for you my stomach trills;
For you Febreze and freshen’d air – for you the lab a-cursing;
For you they call, the offended mass, their eager noses turning;
     Here ‘captan! Dear product!
          The cheese you must have cut;
               It is no dream that on the bench,
                    You smell just like a butt.

The Captain does not answer, his face is pale and still,
My labmate does not feel my arm, just nauseated will;
The prize now anchored safe and sound, in the hood it’s closed and done;
With fearful zip, the victor skipped, away from object won;
     Exult, O smells, and sing, “O hells!”
          The stench, revulsive glut,
               Walk not near hoods Mercaptans lie,
                    They smell just like a butt.

CBC has, to this point, been a meme-free blog.  However, this one is relevant and interesting, so we’ll play along.

These are a few of our favorite (chemistry) things:

Ψ*Ψ

1. Crystals!!!!!  Especially functionalized pentacene crystals.  Such a gorgeous shade of blue…  I think I like them even more if I have to work for them.  (Sadly, I haven’t recrystallized anything in a long time.)

2. X-rays and all the amazing things they do.  (See also: all those crazy techniques with acronyms.  Acronyms are sexy.)

3. The smell of diethyl ether in the morning…or anytime, really…

4. That moment, after the anticipation of pumping down and turning on the current and waiting, when the aluminum finally starts to evaporate.  And the subsequent moment when you have to think very quickly and fiddle with the current so you can find the delicate balance between blasting your sample with hot metal and cooling things down so much the evaporation stops.

5. AFM tips that work perfectly as soon as you load them, and that stay good for a few weeks.  (And then you get clumsy and they break.)

6. Materials that are blue in solution but fluoresce red.

7. Large-scale Grignard reactions.  It’s been a long time, but I miss the foaminess and the excitement.  (I don’t miss that time I fucked up the quench and painted my hood.)

8. Discussing awesome science while thoroughly drunk.  (Speaking of which…I could use some friends in the condensed matter side of organic electronics.  I supply beer, you supply everything you know?  Good deal?)

9. Data that makes you go WTF?!

10. Really awesome collaborators.  (You know who you are if you’re reading this, which I’m not sure you are.)

Excimer

1. PERFECT columns. You know, the kind of column where everything is soluble, you have perfect separation, perfect bands, and you get like 95% yield. And when the bands are pretty colors too. And it takes like an hour to run. Most people run one once every four years or so.

2. Pretty NMR spectra. You know, the kind of NMR spectra that don’t have anything in them but your beloved compound.

3. Huge-ass crystals. You know, the kind of crystals that are huge-ass. (and diffract X-rays well, but that’s neither here nor there. huge-ass, pretty crystals are my raison d’être.)

4. “This isn’t gonna fucking work” preps. You know, the kind of prep you have (that, OF COURSE, is the only one that exists) that’s from the 1930s that requires reagents now prohibited by the Geneva Conventions that you read and think, “well, that won’t fucking work.” Then it does. On the first try. Congratulations, you now have pure product! And ebola AIDS. (The orgsyn prep for biphenylene is my favorite example.)

5. Glowing reviews from reviewers. You know, the kind of review for your manuscript that is brimming with such epic gushing for the marvelous science contained within, it almost seems like it was written by a tenure-grubbing young assistant professor in your tenured boss’ field…

6. Nanococks. You know.

7. Alcohol. You know, the stuff you drink with other chemists when you’ve just had a week completely bereft of anything on your top 10 list. No field commiserates quite like chemists do.

8. Really weird glassware. You know, the kind of glassware you find in a drawer and you’re like “what in the everliving fuck is this?!?” Bonus points if you end up using it for something other than its intended purpose.

9. Undergrads. You know, cause it’s better than actually washing glassware.

10. Chemists’ egregious inability to adequately express themselves in original prose. You know… dude’s gotta fill a niche somehow, right?

LiqC

1. ¹³C satellites of sharp multiplets in an impeccable ¹H NMR.

2. The chemical lingo. Not any professional language is as diverse and makes this much sense. And the fact that we still prefer handwaving (you know, it’s this cycle with this group here and this group there) over shooting systematic names in a conversation.

3. Bucket-scale reactions that work. And huge-ass filters, for filtering your huge-ass crystals.

4. Eyeballing solutions of highly fluorescent compounds at different angles. Instant reactions with fluorescence turn-on. MAGIC!

5. Heatgun rearrangements.

6. Filling up a sink with dry ice and watching the white clouds creep out from all sides. (Just don’t flush, or you’ll crack the sink, ok?)

7. Having a fumehood to myself.

8. Lecturers that keep me awake.

9. High-innuendo paper titles. Copper nanotubes. Attacking backsides.

10. Passing oral quals. OMFG, it’s in 8 hours, what am I doing?!

Even people who don’t work in organic electronics probably still have opinions concerning what we do.  So here’s the million dollar question: in terms of efficiency, mobility or any other performance metric, is higher always better?

This is a topic that’s been brought up several times in one of my classes this quarter.  By now it’s pretty obvious that you can throw a conjugated polymer in with PCBM (the C₆₀ or especially the extra-light-absorbent C₇₀ flavor) and expect around or above 1% power conversion efficiency, given a good device lab and good characterization hands and some half-assed optimization.[1]  Maybe I’m making it sound easy, but my labmates see numbers on that order pretty frequently.  Sure, it’s nice that we can throw in something new with a studied-to-death fullerene and get a result that looks good enough to publish.

So can everyone else, though–and papers like this are becoming ubiquitous.  Organic photovoltaics, as a field, has exploded in the last few years.  And it’s not a bad area to do research in–there’s an interesting mess of problems to solve, and there seems to be a good deal of funding.  Trouble is, a lot of people aren’t doing much to solve the problems.  They’ve fallen into the Nickelback trap.

Nickelback, you see, is a bit formulaic in their songwriting.[2]  (I would embed a video or two, to further my point, but then you’d just have to take a shower and gouge your eyes out, and we don’t want that.)  While they’re still making money, what they do is detrimental to the greater community of people who listen to the radio (or who frequent such establishments as play that kind of horrible music).

Thing is, certain parts of the literature are getting a little formulaic too.  Low-bandgap conjugated polymers are not new.  They have been synthesized to death.  As long as you can make one with the right HOMO and LUMO levels–and those can be tuned pretty readily with a little intelligent target design–you’ll probably have something that will work as a donor in a solar cell with a fullerene.[3]

But when you do that, you are like Nickelback. (And no one wants to be like Nickelback.)  Worse, by putting all kinds of half-characterized crap out there, you put more pressure on the field for better numbers.  Not better science, just better results.  And then things get very competitive and other people start following the same formula just because it works.  Even if you’re doing very thorough device optimization, and you’re getting record-breaking efficiencies, you should take a moment and think: will anyone else learn from this?

And if the answer is no, you need to chill out and go back and characterize everything to death, especially the things that didn’t work so well.  If you’re thorough with it, you can pull out some really interesting data, and then you can maybe draw some structure-property relationships.[4]  And that’s what helps the field advance–if you can give the synthetikers clear-cut guidelines as to what will probably work and what probably won’t, then the efficiencies will keep climbing because we’ll understand what’s going on in the devices.

Remember, y’all–transformative research is not like Nickelback.  Systematic is good, formulaic is bad. Groundbreaking science should surprise you…like Bjork.[5]

[1] Or even just one of the three.  Hell, I know I got over 1% with P3HT and PCBM when I first started this business, and I most definitely did not have good characterization hands.

[2] By which I mean they really only have one song and every time I hear it I want to punch something.  This may be the desired effect, considering that drunk rednecks comprise much of their fan base.

[3] You get a free pass–for now–if you’re making acceptors that aren’t fullerenes.  (Also, I’ll reserve my spaghetti rant for a later post.)

[4] Where have I heard that before?  …Well, I guess turning into my advisor is much preferable to turning into my mother.

[5] Full disclosure: You might laugh at my efficiencies.  But I have some really cool data.

How in the world did it get into Science?

Science 1880, 1(1), 12.