CPOS Seminar: "Diazirine-Containing Polymers as Efficient Photo-Crosslinkers"

Speaker: Banruo Huang, Postdoctoral Researcher, UC Santa Barbara - Materials Research Laboratory, Hawker Group

Diazirines are an underexplored class of functional groups that can serve as precursors for carbenes, enabling downstream reactions such as σ-bond insertion for C–H functionalization of polymer backbones. The efficient generation of carbene intermediates can be achieved through either thermal or photochemical activation of diazirines with recent studies highlighting bis-diazirines as cross-linkers for various commodity polymers. Herein, we report facile syntheses of structurally diverse diazirine-containing homo- and co-polymers based on different polymerization methods. The resulting polymers were used as efficient photo-crosslinkers. The on-demand activation of these diazirine-containing materials enables a wide range of applications including photopatterning and 3D printing.