Emma Horgan is a master's student in physics at Imperial College London with a specialisation in experimental condensed matter physics. She is currently working on her master's thesis in the group of Professor Ji-Seon Kim studying polaron formation in chemically doped organic semiconductors. She has previously worked in the group of Professor Christoph Stampfer at RWTH Aachen University working on bilayer graphene quantum dots as part of the Matter and Light for Quantum Computing (ML4Q) internship programme in 2024.
Additionally, she worked in the group of Dr Julie Euvrard at Imperial College London working on electrical characterisation methods for high impedance semiconductors in 2023.
Her talk delves on organic semiconductors, whichcombine semiconducting capabilities with plastic-like flexibility and can be doped to tune their properties. While electrical doping is simpler but hard to quantify, recent studies have chemically doped P3HT to observe polaron formation via Raman and UV-Vis measurements, supported by density functional theory. The next step is to create a quantitative comparison of electrical and chemical doping and extend this approach to other organic semiconductors.