Hydrogen-Bonding Trends in a Bithiophene with 3- and/or 4-Pyridyl Substituents

Alison M. Costello, Rebekah Duke, Stephanie Sorensen, Nadeesha L. Kothalawala, Moses Ogbaje, Nandini Sarkar, Doo Young Kim, Chad Risko, Sean R. Parkin, Aron J. Huckaba

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

To improve the charge-carrier transport capabilities of thin-film organic materials, the intermolecular electronic couplings in the material should be maximized. Decreasing intermolecular distance while maintaining proper orbital overlap in highly conjugated aromatic molecules has so far been a successful way to increase electronic coupling. We attempted to decrease the intermolecular distance in this study by synthesizing cocrystals of simple benzoic acid coformers and dipyridyl-2,2′-bithiophene molecules to understand how the coformer identity and pyridine N atom placement affected solid-state properties. We found that with the 5-(3-pyridyl)-5′-(4-pyridyl)-isomer, the 4-pyridyl ring interacted with electrophiles and protons more strongly. Synthesized cocrystal powders were found to have reduced average crystallite size in reference to the parent compounds. The opposite was found for the intermolecular electronic couplings, as determined via density functional theory (DFT) calculations, which were relatively large in some of the cocrystals.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)24485-24494
Number of pages10
JournalACS Omega
Volume8
Issue number27
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 11 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This material is based upon the work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. 1849213. The diffractometer was funded by the NSF MRI CHE-1625732. The authors acknowledge the UK Center for Computational Sciences and Information Technology Services Research Computing for their fantastic support and collaboration and use of the Lipscomb and Morgan Compute Clusters and associated research computing resources.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Chemistry (all)
  • Chemical Engineering (all)

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