Organic photovoltaics offer an opportunity to make solar cells more affordable and widely accessible using cheap, solution-processable light-absorbing layers. In order to realize new technologies, a fundamental understanding of organic chromophore photophysics is required to overcome efficiency limitations. Throughout this doctoral work, I investigated the kinetic and physical characteristics of...
Semiconductor nanocrystals possess unique photophysical properties that make them desirable for many optoelectronic applications such as photovoltaics, LEDs, and quantum computing. When the size of a semiconductor is reduced to below the excitonic Bohr radius of the material, its carriers becomes quantum confined resulting in drastic changes to optical, electronic,...
This work examines important heterogeneous processes of organic molecules on surfaces, in the contexts of atmospheric and indoor environments. In large forest ecosystems, biogenic secondary organic aerosols (SOAs) constitute a dominant fraction of organic particulate matter in the atmosphere. The formation of SOAs starts from the emission of volatile organic...
This dissertation describes the study of photoinduced charge transfer between QDs and molecular acceptors as a probe of the defects within ligand shells of QDs and as means to photocatalyze redox reactions. For charge transfer reactions to occur between QDs and molecules in bulk solution, the molecules must interact with...
Over the past 15 years, there have been significant developments in expanding the singlet fission (SF) library and understanding the SF mechanism. SF has been a topic of interest in recent years due to its potential applications in organic photovoltaics. During SF, a singlet exciton energetically down-converts into two triplet...
Increasing industrialization and the resulting negative environmental impacts highlight the need to develop alternative renewable energy sources. The Sun is a massive source and organic solar cells are a growing field of study. As new materials are synthesized, the efficiencies of organic solar cells continue to grow, but without an...
In this thesis, I present the development and benchmarking of several theoretical methods designed to enable the rigorous modeling of magnetic properties of molecules containing one or a few heavy atoms, particularly single-molecule magnets. The new methods use a full four-component treatment of relativity, allowing spin–orbit effects to be taken...