Band-Like Electron Transport in Organic Transistors and Implication of the Molecular Structure for Performance Optimization

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates band-like electron transport in n-channel organic transistors, revealing how molecular structure and dielectric environment influence performance, and proposes new structure-property relationships for optimizing high-mobility organic transistors.

Contribution

It reports the first observation of band-like electron transport in n-channel OFETs and elucidates the molecular and dielectric factors affecting this phenomenon.

Findings

Band-like transport observed in n-channel OFETs based on PDIF-CN2.

Performance suppression correlates with higher dielectric constant.

Molecular structure and crystal packing influence charge transport behavior.

Abstract

Single-crystal organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) based on p-channel molecular semiconductors have led to breakthrough carrier mobilities and to the observation of band-like transport. These results represent the limit in our quest for the ultimate OFET performance. However, band-like transport has not been reported for n-channel OFETs and, for p-channel transistors, it is not understood why it occurs only for certain molecular materials. Here we report band-like electron transport for n-channel OFETs based on PDIF-CN2 single-crystals. Devices with different gate dielectrics - vacuum, Cytop, PMMA - are compared and we find that the performance is suppressed for those with larger dielectric constant. This phenomenon parallels that observed for holes in p-channel OFETs, however, the magnitude of the suppression is smaller, an effect that can be rationalized by the semiconductor molecular structure and crystal packing. A quantitative analysis of our findings, together with results on different high-quality p-channel transistors, indicates the importance of the interplay between the semiconductor molecular polarizability and the structure of the charge transport layers in the crystal, as a key factor enabling band-like transport. Based on these considerations, we suggest unprecedented structure-property relationships useful for performance optimization of high-mobility organic transistors.