Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Signatures of "band-like" transport in organic electronic materials

I used to regularly write posts about charge transport in organic electronic materials. Some of these generated lively discussion in the comments section.

This morning I read an interesting paper Band-Like Electron Transport in Organic Transistors and Implication of the Molecular Structure for Performance Optimization
by Nikolas Minder, Shimpei Ono, Zhihua Chen, Antonio Facchetti, Alberto Morpurgo

They correctly distinguish "band-like" transport where a charge carrier is delocalised over just a few molecules from true band transport where it is delocalised over a large number of molecules [or unit cells in a crystalline semiconductor such as silicon].

They claim that a signature of band-like transport is the common observation of a mobility that decreases with increasing temperature and a Hall effect signal. I agree with the former but am confused about the latter. I thought for incoherent polaron transport one could still have a Hall effect, as discussed in a classic paper by Friedman and Holstein. 

The authors overlook the fact that a signature of band-like transport is that the mobility should be larger than e a^2/hbar ~ 1 cm^2/Vsec. Ignorance of this old and important result seems to be common in the field.

Previously, I pointed out that comparing the relative magnitudes of the energy gaps respectively associated with mobility, optical conductivity, and thermopower is a nice way to distinguish coherent from incoherent transport.

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