📢Excited to share our latest research published in Advanced Electronic Materials!📢. We present an automated toolbox for detailed nanoscale electrical characterisation of electrolyte-gated organic transistors (EGOTs) across various bias points. 🧵1/9.

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🎉 Happy to receive IBEC Doctoral Certificate of Excellence at the 2024 IBEC Symposium✨ . Thanks to @IBECBarcelona for this recognition!

🎉Thrilled to share that I have been awarded the Extraordinary Doctoral Prize by the @UniBarcelona!🏆. A huge thanks to my extraordinary supervisors (@adricakyndiah and @GomilaIBECLab), colleagues, family, and friends for their support and encouragement.✨

9/🧑‍🔬 Special thanks to @adricakyndiah and @GomilaIBECLab who supervised my PhD thesis @IBECBarcelona @UniBarcelona, as part of which this toolbox was developed. Thanks to Sara in @MMTgroupICMAB for the amazing devices and @RMillanSol for the simulations. @AdvSciNews.

8/🌐 We have already utilised this toolbox to do some amazing work. Check out the linked Twitter thread. We're excited to see where this toolbox will lead!.

7/⚡️ Our toolbox allows us to perform such intricate studies, which would be instrumental for the targeted optimisation and fundamental understanding of EGOT-based technologies.

6/🛑 One critical finding was the degradation of local electrical properties at high gate voltages. This degradation seems to stem from the destruction of local crystalline order due to electrochemical swelling, starting near the source electrode edge.

5/📊 We validated our automated setup using EGOTs based on the blend of organic small molecule semiconductors and insulating polymers, operating as accumulation-mode field-effect transistors. The toolbox enabled us to observe the nuances of their performance and stability.

4/🛠️ But before that, we must address issues affecting data reproducibility and accuracy. With in-liquid SDM measurements, high-frequency artefacts can completely mask the actual trends. Surprisingly, we found easy ways to correct these artefacts! [details in the paper].

3/🎯 Towards this goal, we developed *automated* scanning dielectric microscopy (SDM) capable of operando in-liquid electrical measurements. It allows us to observe the evolution of local electrical properties in unprecedented detail, which wouldn't be feasible if done manually.

2/🌐 EGOTs are pivotal for biosensing and bioelectronic applications. Many questions still need to be answered to harness their potential truly. However, we lack tools that can probe them systematically under operating conditions in a reproducible and accurate manner.

RT @MMTgroupICMAB: Congratulations Shubham! It has been a pleasure to collaborate with you and your group! Very nice work!.

9/🧑‍🔬 Special thanks to @adricakyndiah and @GomilaIBECLab, who supervised my PhD thesis @IBECBarcelona @UniBarcelona in which this article forms one of the chapters. Thanks to Sara in @MMTgroupICMAB for amazing devices, and @RMillanSol for endless simulations. @AdvSciNews.

8/🌐 Practical implications abound! Our study paves the way for direct structure-property-function relationships in various other materials in operating conditions and thus would immensely help in creating new design rules.

7/⚡️ We investigated various charge transport parameters, such as contact access resistances, inter- and intra-domain charge transport, microstructural inhomogeneities, and conduction anisotropy, and were able to precisely pinpoint the bottlenecks in such devices.

6/🔥 This was the turning point! We effectively circumvented the fundamental and technical challenges with the conventional KPFM operation in electrolytes. With local electric potential maps, we can extract tons of information that was previously inaccessible at the nanoscale.

5/💡 To quantify, we introduced a robust interpretation framework of in-liquid SDM, which enabled local electric potential mapping directly from raw experimental data - no calibration or numerical simulations required! 🤯

4/📊 From sub-threshold, linear to saturation regimes until the onset of pinch-off, our study offers a comprehensive nanoscale assessment of their functional mechanisms. We identified how different microstructure arrangements affect the evolution of local electrical properties.

3/🎯 In this work, we show that automated in-liquid scanning dielectric microscopy (in-liquid SDM) can be an amazing tool to systematically probe the local electrical properties of operating EGOFET devices across all operational regimes.