Diversifying Catalysts, Monomers, Cross-Coupling Strategies and functional Groups in the Controlled Synthesis of Conjugated Polymers

<p>The ability to precisely incorporate monomers into polymeric materials grants polymer chemists access to a variety of complex architectures. These materials are commonly prepared by living chain-growth polymerization techniques which have revolutionized the field of polymer synthesis. Catalyst-transfer polycondensation (CTP) is one of those chain-growth methods to afford well-defined conjugated polymers. Serving as active components in most of optoelectronic devices, conjugated polymers prepared by CTP exhibit improved device performance due to uniform polymeric structures. Some promising features CTP can provide include control over size and microstructure, good chain end fidelity and the construction of sophisticated polymeric frameworks with functionality. The frontier of CTP research now focuses on (a) understanding the exact mechanism, (b) monomer scope expansion by rational design of catalysts and conjugated monomers, and (c) obtaining conjugated materials with structural diversity. This dissertation details some of our endeavor towards diversifying the choice of catalysts, monomers, cross-coupling reactions and functional groups available in CTP process.