Advancements in π-conjugated polymers: harnessing cycloalkyl straps for high-performance π-conjugated materials.

Pendant alkyl chains are widely used to successfully obtain a wide variety of soluble linear 1D π-conjugated polymers. Over the past several decades, a wide variety of π-conjugated polymers have been synthesized to realize the desired properties and improve the performance of organic electronic devices. However, this strategy is not suitable for generating soluble 2D-π-conjugated materials, including ladder polymers, nanoribbons, and 2D-π-conjugated polymers, due to strong van der Waals interactions between the ribbons and sheets.

Pyrazinacene conjugated polymers: a breakthrough in synthesis and unraveling the conjugation continuum.

Pyrazinacenes are next generation N-heteroacenes and represent a novel class of stable n-type materials capable of accepting more than one electron and displaying intriguing features, including prototropism, halochromism, and redox chromism. Astonishingly, despite a century since their discovery, there have been no reports on the conjugated polymers of pyrazinacenes due to unknown substrate scope and lack of pyrazinacene monomers that are conducive to condensation polymerization. Breaking through these challenges, in this work, we report the synthesis of previously undiscovered and highly coveted conjugated polymers of pyrazinacenes.