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Organic semiconductors

Carrier characteristics

Nature Materials volume 9, pages 703–704 (2010)Cite this article

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Combining optical spectroscopy and transport measurements illuminates the conduction mechanism in high-quality, polycrystalline films.

The nature of charge carriers and the mechanisms of charge transport in organic semiconductors (OSCs) are of great interest, both in terms of fundamental science and because of the implications for the technological applications of these materials. In highly pure single crystals of small-molecule OSCs such as rubrene, electronic conduction improves with decreasing temperature, consistent with expectations that charge carriers in these ordered materials should occupy states that extend over many molecules1. In contrast, electronic conduction in many polymeric or polycrystalline OSCs degrades exponentially with decreasing temperature, consistent with the idea that conduction is dominated by thermally activated hopping of localized carriers. Recently, however, very high-quality polymeric and small-molecule devices have shown greatly improved room-temperature conduction. Moreover, at large voltages and short device lengths (high electric fields), conduction in these devices, although highly nonlinear, becomes nearly temperature independent at low temperatures. This behaviour has prompted claims of a transition to a metallic state with delocalized charge carriers2, and further claims of even more exotic physics, when carriers are theorized to break into separate charge and spin excitations3.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Douglas Natelson is in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rice University, 6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77005, USA. natelson@rice.edu,

    Douglas Natelson

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  1. Douglas Natelson
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Natelson, D. Carrier characteristics. Nature Mater 9, 703–704 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2845

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2845

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