No Arabic abstract
Functional composite thin films have a wide variety of applications in flexible and/or electronic devices, telecommunications and multifunctional emerging coatings. Rapid screening of their properties is a challenging task, especially with multiple components defining the targeted properties. In this work we present a manifold for accelerated automated screening of viscous graphene suspensions for optimal electrical conductivity. Using Opentrons OT2 robotic auto-pipettor, we tested 3 most industrially significant surfactants - PVP, SDS and T80 - by fabricating 288 samples of graphene suspensions in aqueous hydroxypropylmethylcellulose. Enabled by our custom motorized 4-point probe measurement setup and computer vision algorithms, we then measured electrical conductivity of every sample using custom and identified that the highest performance is achieved for PVP-based samples, peaking at 10.4 mS/cm. The automation of the experimental procedure allowed us to perform majority of the experiments using robots, while involvement of human researcher was kept to minimum. Overall the experiment was completed in less than 18 hours, only 3 of which involved humans.
CuI has been recently rediscovered as a p-type transparent conductor with a high figure of merit. Even though many metal iodides are hygroscopic, the effect of moisture on the electrical properties of CuI has not been clarified. In this work, we observe a two-fold increase in the conductivity of CuI after exposure to ambient humidity for 5 hours, followed by slight long-term degradation. Simultaneously, the work function of CuI decreases by almost 1 eV, which can explain the large spread in the previously reported work function values. The conductivity increase is partially reversible and is maximized at intermediate humidity levels. Based on the large intra-grain mobility measured by THz spectroscopy, we suggest that hydration of grain boundaries may be beneficial for the overall hole mobility.
Combining high-throughput experiments with machine learning allows quick optimization of parameter spaces towards achieving target properties. In this study, we demonstrate that machine learning, combined with multi-labeled datasets, can additionally be used for scientific understanding and hypothesis testing. We introduce an automated flow system with high-throughput drop-casting for thin film preparation, followed by fast characterization of optical and electrical properties, with the capability to complete one cycle of learning of fully labeled ~160 samples in a single day. We combine regio-regular poly-3-hexylthiophene with various carbon nanotubes to achieve electrical conductivities as high as 1200 S/cm. Interestingly, a non-intuitive local optimum emerges when 10% of double-walled carbon nanotubes are added with long single wall carbon nanotubes, where the conductivity is seen to be as high as 700 S/cm, which we subsequently explain with high fidelity optical characterization. Employing dataset resampling strategies and graph-based regressions allows us to account for experimental cost and uncertainty estimation of correlated multi-outputs, and supports the proving of the hypothesis linking charge delocalization to electrical conductivity. We therefore present a robust machine-learning driven high-throughput experimental scheme that can be applied to optimize and understand properties of composites, or hybrid organic-inorganic materials.
Discovering and optimizing commercially viable materials for clean energy applications typically takes over a decade. Self-driving laboratories that iteratively design, execute, and learn from material science experiments in a fully autonomous loop present an opportunity to accelerate this research. We report here a modular robotic platform driven by a model-based optimization algorithm capable of autonomously optimizing the optical and electronic properties of thin-film materials by modifying the film composition and processing conditions. We demonstrate this platform by using it to maximize the hole mobility of organic hole transport materials commonly used in perovskite solar cells and consumer electronics. This demonstration highlights the possibilities of using autonomous laboratories to discover organic and inorganic materials relevant to materials sciences and clean energy technologies.
We show that simple, commercially sourced n-channel silicon field-effect transistors (nFETs) operating under closed loop control exhibit an ~3-fold improvement in pH readout resolution to (7.2+/-0.3)x10^-3 at a bandwidth of 10 Hz when compared with the open loop operation commonly employed by integrated ion-sensitive field-effect transistors (ISFETs). We leveraged the improved nFET performance to measure the change in solution pH arising from the activity of a pathological form of the kinase Cdk5, an enzyme implicated in Alzheimers disease, and showed quantitative agreement with previous measurements. The improved pH resolution was realized while the devices were operated in a remote sensing configuration with the pH sensing element off-chip and connected electrically to the FET gate terminal. We compared these results with those measured by using a custom-built dual-gate 2D field-effect transistor (dg2DFET) fabricated with 2D semi-conducting MoS2 channels and a moderate device gain, alpha=8. Under identical solution conditions the pH resolution of the nFETs was only 2-fold worse than the dg2DFETs pH resolution of (3.9+/-0.7)x10^-3. Finally, using the nFETs, we demonstrated the effectiveness of a custom polypeptide, p5, as a therapeutic agent in restoring the function of Cdk5. We expect that the straight-forward modifications to commercially sourced nFETs demonstrated here will lower the barrier to widespread adoption of these remote-gate devices and enable sensitive bioanalytical measurements for high throughput screening in drug discovery and precision medicine applications.
Phase change memory (PCM) is an emerging data storage technology, however its programming is thermal in nature and typically not energy-efficient. Here we reduce the switching power of PCM through the combined approaches of filamentary contacts and thermal confinement. The filamentary contact is formed through an oxidized TiN layer on the bottom electrode, and thermal confinement is achieved using a monolayer semiconductor interface, three-atom thick MoS2. The former reduces the switching volume of the phase change material and yields a 70% reduction in reset current versus typical 150 nm diameter mushroom cells. The enhanced thermal confinement achieved with the ultra-thin (~6 {AA}) MoS2 yields an additional 30% reduction in switching current and power. We also use detailed simulations to show that further tailoring the electrical and thermal interfaces of such PCM cells toward their fundamental limits could lead up to a six-fold benefit in power efficiency.