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Chirality and Carbon-Based Semiconductors: Designing Tomorrow’s Tech with Twisted Light
In this talk, Jess Wade explores how material science and chemistry can create tomorrow’s technologies with lower environmental impact. She traces the power of carbon-based semiconductors and the special role of chirality in controlling light and spin, from OLED displays to potential quantum devices. The talk weaves history, biology, and modern engineering to show how small molecular changes can drastically alter device performance, and how education and outreach can broaden participation in science.
Overview: Material Science for Tomorrow’s Technologies
Jess Wade presents a broad look at how material science can address societal and environmental challenges while enabling next-generation technologies. She begins by highlighting the remarkable trajectory of technology—from room-sized computers to portable devices—and contrasts it with the relatively stagnant evolution of solar panels since their first silicon cell in the 1950s. Wade argues that to achieve longer battery life, better outdoor usability, health monitoring capabilities, and sustainable energy solutions, we must rethink materials, chemistry, and engineering. She foregrounds critical global issues: supply-chain constraints for rare elements, geopolitical complexities, and the enormous energy demand of data centres powering AI platforms. The big question she poses is whether we can design materials that don’t cost the earth, and the answer, she asserts, lies in chemistry and molecular design, especially in carbon-based systems and chirality.
Carbon and the History of Molecular Design
The talk dives into carbon’s unique bonding flexibility, explained through its four outer-shell electrons and the variety of allotropes such as diamond, graphite, graphene, fullerenes, and carbon nanotubes. A central homage is paid to Millie Dresselhaus, the “carbon queen,” who predicted properties of carbon allotropes and helped shape the field. Wade recounts the lineage from the crystallography work of Kathleen Lonsdale and Bragg to Dorothy Hodgkin’s Nobel-winning diffraction studies, illustrating how crystallography and structural understanding underpin modern materials design. These stories ground the talk in a history where fundamental science translates into practical technologies.
From Benzene to Semiconductors: The Power of Delocalization
Wade explains benzene’s unusual stability and how its delocalized electrons create a conductive pathway that transforms an insulator into a semiconductor. This mechanism underpins organic electronics, including OLEDs, where chemistry directly tunes optical and electronic properties. She emphasizes that organic materials enable flexible, printed devices on plastic substrates, offering advantages in weight, form factor, biocompatibility, and the potential for integrated ion and electron transport. The discussion also covers the commercial impact of early breakthroughs in conjugated polymers, noting the OLED sector’s enormous growth and its current ubiquity in displays and lighting.
Chirality as a Design Rule: From Molecules to Devices
The core theme centers on chirality, the existence of non-superimposable mirror images in objects from electrons to beetle shells and human biology. Wade walks through the historical development of chirality, including optical rotation and Pasteur’s pioneering observations with tartaric acid crystals, campanulated by later crystallographic advances. The demonstration with cellulose tape and polarizers visually illustrates optical rotation and the wavelength dependence of rotation, making a compelling case for chirality as a fundamental design principle across scales. Beating the drum for the ubiquity of handedness in biology—DNA, proteins, and even fragrances—is a thread that ties science to daily life and technology.
“What if we could create materials that didn't cost the earth to do it?” - Jess Wade
Chirality in Light, Spin, and Magnetism
The talk moves from qualitative descriptions of chirality to quantitative light-matter interactions. Delocalized chiral orbitals in helicenes give rise to twisted or circularly polarized light, and chiral molecules can drive spin-polarized transport at room temperature, a property usually associated with inorganic magnets. Wade outlines how this can enable new optoelectronic devices, memory elements, and quantum photonic platforms, where single-photon emitters and room-temperature operation are crucial for practicality. She highlights the synergy between chemistry, physics, and engineering in achieving scalable, reproducible molecular systems with well-defined chiral and spin properties.
Applications: Displays, Detectors, and Beyond
In practical terms, chirality improves device performance in several arenas. For OLED displays, emitting twisted light can reduce losses through anti-glare filters and potentially boost brightness and efficiency. In photovoltaics and smart windows, chiral molecules enable new routes to light management and energy conversion. The talk also emphasizes potential fully flexible photonic devices, 3D imaging, and bio-communication interfaces. The discussion extends to brain sensing and non-invasive magneto-optic sensing, where light-mmatter interactions could reveal magnetic fields associated with neural activity or structural health monitoring. Wade underscores the broader implication: molecules pattern themselves across scales to produce amplified chiral responses, providing a scalable, tunable platform for next-generation technologies.
“Chirality is a design rule in biology and a powerful tool in technology, enabling spin-polarized transport and magneto-optic effects.” - Jess Wade
Education, Outreach, and the Future of Science
Beyond the lab, Wade emphasizes science communication and public engagement. She describes her efforts to make complex science accessible through art-inspired exhibitions, school outreach, and a published catalog of children’s books that convey concepts like nanoscale science and energy. She also discusses policy collaboration, including a recent course for civil servants on quantum technologies to bridge the gap between research and governance. Through these activities, she argues, the future of science relies on connecting researchers with the public and decision-makers to maximize societal benefit.
“Chirality is massively fantastically wonderful. Nature has chosen it as a design rule across scales, and it offers huge potential for technologies that control light and spin.” - Jess Wade