Wednesday, 1 June 2022: 16:00
West Meeting Room 202 (Vancouver Convention Center)
The thermoelectric performance of semiconductor-enriched carbon nanotube networks is intimately connected to the charge-carrier density injected into the network. This process is typically carried out by charge transfer to or from a chemical dopant, resulting in chemical counterions that reside within the network. While it is commonly accepted that the chemical structure of the dopant controls the redox properties, and therefore the ability of the dopant to modify the charge-carrier density in the carbon nanotube network, less attention is placed on the role that the residual counterion plays in the carrier transport within the doped network. We will show that the chemical structure of some novel p-type dopants based on dodecaborane clusters appended with various tunable organic moieties enables effective spatial separation of the negative counter-charge on the center of the dodecaborane cluster from the hole density injected into the carbon nanotube. This increased spatial separation, compared to more conventional oxidants like triethyloxonium hexachloroantimonate (OA) and 2,3,5,6-tetrafluoro-7,7,8,8-tetracyanoquinodimethane (F4-TCNQ), leads to a reduction in the coulombic potential barrier and improved hole transport. The enhanced transport can be attributed to reduced carrier localization, resulting in an increase in the thermoelectric power factor that surpasses the previous best-in-class for enriched semiconductor single-walled carbon nanotube thin film networks.