Question: what gave you this idea

Jess Wade answered on 15 Jun 2015:

The idea I’m working on (plastic electronics) was actually invented in the 1970s, before I was born. Some clever scientists who are now professors at my university found that some organic materials could emit light when you put electricity through them. This was really exciting, because the materials are just long chains of carbon and hydrogen bonds, so usually we think of them as ‘insulators’ which cannot conduct electricity.

At the moment I’m looking at how different molecules change the way they stand up or move about depending on different things like what what i’ve mixed them with, their temperature, or whether I’ve put any electricity through them. To make good electronic devices we have to mix different materials, and lots of things change like the colours they glow or the colours that they absorb. I want to know why those colours change. So I use lots of cool lasers and bright lights to try and look at different parts of the molecules and see if they are facing different directions or behaving differently in the new mixtures.

I guess I got the idea from everything i’ve learnt so far in physics, and also from cooking. When you make a delicious cake, even though you only put a tiny bit of vanilla in (a few teaspoons maybe) you can still taste the effect of vanilla in the whole cake. I know if I mix different things together the materials will arrange differently. What we can’t do when we eat our cake is figure out where the vanilla is. Luckily for me I can go one step further and look at my molecules to try and arrange them in the best way possible to conduct electricity.