Cu-Lighting

Ruben Costa: Leading the research group on synthesis, photophysics and device fabrication.

Luca Cavinato: I am a PhD Student under the supervision of Prof. Costa. In general, my project is about the development of sustainable lighting sources. I am mainly focussing on novel electrodes, emitters and electrolytes for light-emitting electrochemical cells.

Sylvain Gaillard: My role was to lead the structural design of the copper complexes, precisely, to modulate the photophysical properties, i.e. color and brightness.

Mathieu Linares: My role was to lead the computational investigation of the metallic complexes. Precisely to understand the nature of the electronic transitions at play and to guide the design of more efficient metallic complexes.

Ruben Costa: To understand how we can design a crystalline powder with the desired photoluminescence features that are fully translated to thin films and finally to thin-film electroluminescent devices. 

Sylvain Gaillard: The biggest challenge was to develop versatile ligands able, initially, to generate highly blue emissive copper complexes. The second biggest challenge was to furnish the rainbow colors by finely tuning the electronic properties.

Mathieu Linares: This team presents a great variety of competencies in terms of synthesis, characterization, computation and device fabrication. This complementarity and the constant dialogue between partners are, I believe, at the origin of the success of this collaboration.

Luca Cavinato: I joined the project only for the last steps, but I am happy to have been part of it. In this last stage of the project we changed approach completely toward the problem. It was the first time that I had a real and practical demonstration of how surprising the prediction of an algorithm can be. It was amazing! Overall, it was a really multidisciplinary work and it has been helpful to talk with people from such different areas of research, I enjoyed and I learned a lot.

Sylvain Gaillard: The development of low cost and environmentally friendly technology for the public is of great importance to decrease the human impact on Earth as much as possible.

Mathieu Linares: This work is important and exciting in the context of the environmental crisis where we need to develop new lighting and display technologies which can function at low voltages and are easily recyclable.

Ruben Costa: This technology will have a big impact on soft-lighting applications for decoration, photo-therapy, etc.

Ruben Costa: Stability is the next challenge, followed by a big reduction of the production costs.

Sylvain Gaillard: I would say that collaboration is mandatory. Indeed, our project deals with very different fields of chemical science and getting all this knowledge in one person appears to be unrealistic.

Ruben Costa: Perspectives and experiences...we must be able to listen building on comments coming from experienced and fresh researchers.

Ruben Costa: We are a technological society that has been driven by stability, efficiency, and comfort...now the big challenge is sustainability.

Luca Cavinato: I studied chemistry and I love this subject. Chemistry is everywhere around us, in all the objects we see and we touch. To me, it has always been fascinating how thanks to chemistry you can start from two compounds with certain properties and end up with a new molecule with completely different characteristics. Nowadays, chemistry is a pillar of our society.

Sylvain Gaillard: Chemistry is the corner stone for the development of new organic materials. Most of the properties in the final devices are based on the molecular architectures.

Ruben Costa: Chemistry is an excellent bridge to bring together disciplines.