Project Grant 2404220

This $600,000 federal Project Grant award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Chemistry under the Mathematical and Physical Sciences program (CFDA 47.049) supports a collaborative research project to understand and control interfacial mass, charge, and energy transfer processes in hybrid nanomaterials composed of metal nanoparticles with conductive polymer coatings. The goal is to utilize charge transfer plasmons to optically transduce nanoscale details about the interfacial physics and chemistry governing these transport phenomena under in operando conditions. The project team, led by researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Leibniz Institute for Polymer Research Dresden, and the Hamburg University of Technology, will pursue three key objectives: 1) design and synthesize the conductive polymer-coated plasmonic nanoparticle hybrids, 2) characterize their properties using customized spectroscopic techniques, and 3) determine the conductance and modulation of charge transfer plasmons by controlling the inter-particle gap distance. The outcomes aim to provide a mechanistic understanding of nanoscale charge and mass transfer, reveal factors contributing to polymer response heterogeneity, and develop transformative strategies for optically determining conductance in conjugated polymers under nanoscale confinement.