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Tuning kinetic competitions to traverse the rich structural space of organic semiconductor thin films

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Abstract

The chemical diversity of organic semiconductors coupled with the kinetic nature of film formation make it challenging to tune the structure of active-layer thin films in organic electronics across multiple length scales. We review techniques to tune aspects of film structure within a framework that accounts for the competition between the time available for structural development and the time required by the organic semiconductors to order, defined by a dimensionless time, τ, that describes the ratio of these two quantities. By considering these two competing time scales, we propose general guidelines to tune the film structure accordingly.

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Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge financial support from the NSF MRSEC program through the Princeton Center for Complex Materials (grant numbers DMR-0819860 and DMR-1420531) and the SOLAR Initiative at the NSF (grant number DMR-1035217).

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Correspondence to Anna M. Hiszpanski or Yueh-Lin Loo.

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Hiszpanski, A.M., Khlyabich, P.P. & Loo, YL. Tuning kinetic competitions to traverse the rich structural space of organic semiconductor thin films. MRS Communications 5, 407–421 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1557/mrc.2015.55

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