No Arabic abstract
We derive the system of equations that allows to include non-equilibrium correlations of filling numbers into the theory of the hopping transport. The system includes the correlations of arbitrary order in a universal way and can be cut at any place relevant to a specific problem to achieve the balance between rigor and computation possibilities. In the linear-response approximation, it can be represented as an equivalent electric circuit that generalizes the Miller-Abrahams resistor network. With our approach, we show that non-equilibrium correlations are essential to calculate conductivity and distribution of currents in certain disordered systems. Different types of disorder affect the correlations in different applied fields. The effect of energy disorder is most important at weak electric fields while the position disorder by itself leads to non-zero correlations only in strong fields.
For hopping transport in disordered materials, the mobility of charge carriers is strongly dependent on temperature and the electric field. Our numerical study shows that both the energy distribution and the mobility of charge carriers in systems with a Gaussian density of states, such as organic disordered semiconductors, can be described by a single parameter - effective temperature, dependent on the magnitude of the electric field. Furthermore, this effective temperature does not depend on the concentration of charge carriers, while the mobility does depend on the charge carrier concentration. The concept of the effective temperature is shown to be valid for systems with and without space-energy correlations in the distribution of localized states.
We discuss memory effects in the conductance of hopping insulators due to slow rearrangements of many-electron clusters leading to formation of polarons close to the electron hopping sites. An abrupt change in the gate voltage and corresponding shift of the chemical potential change populations of the hopping sites, which then slowly relax due to rearrangements of the clusters. As a result, the density of hopping states becomes time dependent on a scale relevant to rearrangement of the structural defects leading to the excess time dependent conductivity.
The influence of Rashba spin-orbit interaction on the spin dynamics of a topologically disordered hopping system is studied in this paper. This is a significant generalization of a previous investigation, where an ordered (polaronic) hopping system has been considered instead. It is found, that in the limit, where the Rashba length is large compared to the typical hopping length, the spin dynamics of a disordered system can still be described by the expressions derived for an ordered system, under the provision that one takes into account the frequency dependence of the diffusion constant and the mobility (which are determined by charge transport and are independent of spin). With these results we are able to make explicit the influence of disorder on spin related quantities as, e.g., the spin life-time in hopping systems.
We present a theory for tunneling spectroscopy in a break-junction semiconductor device for materials in which the electronic conduction mechanism is hopping transport. Starting from the conventional expression for the hopping current we develop an expression for the break-junction tunnel current for the case in which the tunnel resistance is much larger than the effective single-hop resistances. We argue that percolation like methods are inadequate for this case and discuss in detail the interplay of the relevant scales that control the possibility to extract spectroscopic information from the characteristic of the device.
We study a simple non-interacting nearest neighbor tight-binding model in one dimension with disorder, where the hopping terms are chosen randomly. This model exhibits a well-known singularity at the band center both in the density of states and localization length. If the probability distribution of the hopping terms is well-behaved, then the singularities exhibit universal behavior, the functional form of which was first discovered by Freeman Dyson in the context of a chain of classical harmonic oscillators. We show here that this universal form can be violated in a tunable manner if the hopping elements are chosen from a divergent probability distribution. We also demonstrate a connection between a breakdown of universality in this quantum problem and an analogous scenario in the classical domain - that of random walks and diffusion with anomalous exponents.