Carbon-based Organic Thin Film for Optics and Electronics

In the last decades, carbon-based organic materials have attracted much interest from the scientific community in many different fields such as catalysis, supercapacitors, water purification, sensorics, and more. The “tunability” of carbon-like covalent material, in terms of electronic and supramolecular structure, paved the way for new and exciting opportunity in fields like optics and electronics to replace metal-based materials. In our group, we successfully developed methods for CN and BCN thin films in a one-step bottom-up approach via Chemical Vapor Deposition. This technique allows to deposit nanometer sized thin films on different substrates, such as glass, quartz, silicon, copper, ITO, and so on, regardless their shape, overcoming in this way flatness surface requirements of other techniques such as spin coating, spray coating and razor blading.

We develop new strategies to synthesize nanostructured carbon-based materials and derivatives. Our first aim is to generate materials leading to improved performances for optic and electronic applications with regards to sustainability, avoiding uses of toxic gases like in typical CVD processes. However, carbon-based thin films can also find application in electrochemistry, photocatalysis, heterojunctions, energy storage and membranes.