Tunable Energy Level Alignment in the Multilayers of Carboxylic Acids on Silver

TL;DR

This study demonstrates how monolayer carboxylic acid interlayers can precisely tune energy level alignment in organic devices, significantly improving charge injection efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a method to achieve highly tunable energy level shifts using chemically transformed aromatic carboxylic acid monolayers as charge injection layers.

Findings

Energy level shifts up to 0.8 eV achieved

Linear relationship between dipole density and energy levels

Tunable energy alignment enhances device efficiency

Abstract

The precise energy level alignment between a metal electrode and an organic semiconductor is required to reduce contact resistance and enhance the efficiency of organic-semiconductor-based devices. One of the ways is to include interlayers that mediate the energy level alignment, i.e., charge injection layers (CILs). Here we introduce the monolayer thick CILs based on the aromatic carboxylic acids that can induce the energy level shift in the subsequent layers by up to 0.8 eV. By gradual chemical transformation of the as-deposited molecules, we achieve a highly tunable energy level shift in the range of 0.5 eV. We reveal that the position of both the work function and energy-level position in the CIL increases linearly with the density of induced dipoles. The energy level position of subsequent layers changes in the same way as the CIL. Our results thus connect the energy alignment quantities, i.e., energy level positions of both CIL and subsequent layers and sample work function. The high tunability would allow precise tuning of the active layers deposited on the CIL, which marks the path towards efficient charge injection layers on metal electrodes.