Breaking news. Good evening. Scientists at the Institute of Chemical Technology in India have announced the synthesis of a new organic cocrystal, a material that could open doors to next generation electronics. Its detailed properties, however, are still being measured. Our correspondent Yupeng reporting from NYU Tandon, where part of the investigation is underway. Thanks. I'm at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, where researchers have been tasked to categorize this newly recorded cocrystal. And today, I will be interviewing one of the fellow researchers here to learn more details. Thanks for coming, thanks for inviting. So could you tell me a little bit more about what exactly is an organic cocrystal and why is it so important? Well, the organic part is pretty self-explanatory. There are compounds primarily made of carbon atoms bonded to hydrogen atoms, often including other elements like nitrogen and oxygen. And when two or more of these types of compounds come together to form a crystal lattice of donors and acceptors, they become a cocrystal. What is so important about these crystals is that when they come together, new unpredictable properties can form. These properties can depend on the types of organic donors and acceptors chosen or the way they are stacked together. Because there are so many types of variations in cocrystals, many desirable properties are yet to be optimized today. One of the primary properties we are interested in is the electrical properties that comes from the interaction of the frontier orbitals between the donor and acceptor, which can form band gaps granting these insulators high conductivity. The electrical properties are essential for the development of this field because it directly facilitates the fabrication of electronic technology such as OLED sensors and solar panels. Interesting, well, what was your research like? So there's this novel cocrystal donor Benzimidazole hydride (BIH) and acceptor Tetracyanoquinodimethane (TCNQ) that was synthesized by the collaborator of my mentor. The cocrystal was scanned through of X-ray Diffraction (XRD) to obtain a .cif file that contains information like atomic coordinates. My research revolves around mostly investigating the electronic properties using those atomic coordinates to perform computational calculations on the NYU HPC. My investigations are done both on the molecular scale and the crystalline scale. The calculation performs by optimizing the geometry for the lowest electronic energy and then deriving many further properties from that. So what are some results. Molecularly, we are seeing a general consistency of HOMO LUMO gaps across all the DA pairs, averaging around 1.3 eV. We also observe an increase in the gap when we change to a the calculation of higher percentage Hartree-Fock. This [trend] is similar to the well researched cocrystal that is used in industry today, TTF-TCNQ. But visualization shows that the frontier orbitals responsible for the energy gaps are confined to the acceptor, so we are questioning whether the donors and acceptors are coupled. In the crystalline scale, the discrete energy levels interact to form energy bands. And calculation shows that the DA pair SS49 having the most narrow band, suggesting high conductivity. But regardless, the investigation is expected to continue so that we have a complete understanding of these new organic cocrystals. So yeah, organic cocrystals, it stands at the cutting edge of electronic technologies, making our solar panels and other sensors performing better and faster. And it's the ultimate reason why our screens are moving to OLED so that you have to pay extra bucks.