No Arabic abstract
Different from traditional semiconductors, the organic semiconductors normally possess moderate many-body interactions with respect to charge, exciton, spin and phonons. In particular, the diagonal electron-phonon couplings give rise to the spatial localization and the off-diagonal couplings refer to the delocalization. With the competition between them, the electrons are dispersive in a finite extent and unfavorable towards thermal equilibrium. In this context, the quantities from the statistical mechanics such as the entropy have to be reexamined. In order to bridge the localization-delocalization duality and the device performance in organic semiconductors, the quantum heat engine model is employed to describe the charge, exciton and spin dynamics. We adopt the adaptive time-dependent density matrix renormalization group algorithm to calculate the time evolution of the out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC), a quantum dynamic measurement of the entanglement entropy, in three models with two kinds of competing many-body interactions: two-bath lattice model with a single electron, Frenkel-charge transfer mixed model, and the Merrifield model for singlet fission. We respectively investigate the parameter regime that the system is in the many-body localization (MBL) phase indicated by the behavior of OTOC. It is recognized that the novel effects of coherent electron hopping, the ultrafast charge separation and the dissociation of triplet pairs are closely related to the MBL effect. Our investigation unifies the intrinsic mechanisms correlating to charge, exciton and spin into a single framework of quantum entanglement entropy, which may help clarify the complicated and diverse phenomena in organic semiconductors.
The magneto-electronic field effects in organic semiconductors at high magnetic fields are described by field-dependent mixing between singlet and triplet states of weakly bound charge carrier pairs due to small differences in their Lande g-factors that arise from the weak spin-orbit coupling in the material. In this work, we corroborate theoretical models for the high-field magnetoresistance of organic semiconductors, in particular of diodes made of the conducting polymer poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene-sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS) at low temperatures, by conducting magnetoresistance measurements along with multi-frequency continuous-wave electrically detected magnetic resonance experiments. The measurements were performed on identical devices under similar conditions in order to independently assess the magnetic field-dependent spin-mixing mechanism, the so-called {Delta}g mechanism, which originates from differences in the charge-carrier g-factors induced by spin-orbit coupling.
We explore the possibility that hyperfine interaction causes the recently discovered organic magnetoresistance (OMAR) effect. Our study employs both experiment and theoretical modelling. An excitonic pair mechanism model based on hyperfine interaction, previously suggested by others to explain magnetic field effects in organics, is examined. Whereas this model can explain a few key aspects of the experimental data, we, however, uncover several fundamental contradictions as well. By varying the injection efficiency for minority carriers in the devices, we show experimentally that OMAR is only weakly dependent on the ratio between excitons formed and carriers injected, likely excluding any excitonic effect as the origin of OMAR.
We demonstrate that nuclear spin fluctuations lead to the electric current noise in the mesoscopic samples of organic semiconductors showing the pronounced magnetoresistance in weak fields. For the bipolaron and electron-hole mechanisms of organic magnetoresistance, the current noise spectrum consists of the high frequency peak related to the nuclear spin precession in the Knight field of the charge carriers and the low frequency peak related to the nuclear spin relaxation. The shape of the spectrum depends on the external magnetic and radiofrequency fields, which allows one to prove the role of nuclei in magnetoresistance experimentally.
Separating the influence of hyperfine from spin-orbit interactions in spin-dependent carrier recombination and dissociation processes necessitates magnetic resonance spectroscopy over a wide range of frequencies. We have designed compact and versatile coplanar waveguide resonators for continuous-wave electrically detected magnetic resonance, and tested these on organic light-emitting diodes. By exploiting both the fundamental and higher-harmonic modes of the resonators we cover almost five octaves in resonance frequency within a single setup. The measurements with a common pi-conjugated polymer as the active material reveal small but non-negligible effects of spin-orbit interactions, which give rise to a broadening of the magnetic resonance spectrum with increasing frequency.
One of the basic assumptions in organic field-effect transistors, the most fundamental device unit in organic electronics, is that charge transport occurs two-dimensionally in the first few molecular layers near the dielectric interface. Although the mobility of bulk organic semiconductors has increased dramatically, direct probing of intrinsic charge transport in the two-dimensional limit has not been possible due to excessive disorders and traps in ultrathin organic thin films. Here, highly ordered mono- to tetra-layer pentacene crystals are realized by van der Waals (vdW) epitaxy on hexagonal BN. We find that the charge transport is dominated by hopping in the first conductive layer, but transforms to band-like in subsequent layers. Such abrupt phase transition is attributed to strong modulation of the molecular packing by interfacial vdW interactions, as corroborated by quantitative structural characterization and density functional theory calculations. The structural modulation becomes negligible beyond the second conductive layer, leading to a mobility saturation thickness of only ~3nm. Highly ordered organic ultrathin films provide a platform for new physics and device structures (such as heterostructures and quantum wells) that are not possible in conventional bulk crystals.