The energy level alignments at donor/acceptor interfaces in organic photovoltaics (OPVs) play a decisive role in device performance. However, little is known about the interfacial energetics in polymer OPVs due to technical issues of the solution process. Here, the frontier ortbial line-ups at the donor/acceptor interface in high performance polymer OPVs, PTB7/PC71BM, were investigated using in...

Hierarchical composite materials design in biological exoskeletons achieves penetration resistance through a variety of energy-dissipating mechanisms while simultaneously balancing the need for damage localization to avoid compromising the mechanical integrity of the entire structure and to maintain multi-hit capability. Here, we show that the shell of the bivalve Placuna placenta (~99 wt% calc...

We perform a multiscale analysis for the elastic energy of a n-dimensional bilayer thin film of thickness 2δ whose layers are connected through an ε-periodically distributed contact zone. Describing the contact zone as a union of (n − 1)-dimensional balls of radius r ≪ ε (the holes of the sieve) and assuming that δ ≪ ε, we show that the asymptotic memory of the sieve (as ε → 0) is witnessed by ...

A significant episteric ("around a solid") distortion of the hydrogen-bond structure of water is promoted by solutes with nanoscale surface detail and physico-chemical complexity, such as soluble natural proteins. These structural distortions defy analysis because the discrete nature of the solvent at the interface is not upheld by the continuous laws of electrostatics. This work derives and va...