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This is the author version published as: Giulianini, Michele and Waclawik, Eric R. and Bell, John M. and Motta, Nunzio (2010) Temperature and electric field dependent mobility in poly„3-hexylthiophene diodes. Journal of Applied Physics, 108(1). 014512-1-014512-4.
Catalogue from Homo Faber 2007
Copyright 2010 American Institute of Physics
Temperature and electric field dependent mobility in Poly(3-hexyl-thiophene) diodes Michele Giulianini1, Eric R. Waclawik2, John M. Bell1 and Nunzio Motta1
1
School of Engineering Systems
Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St., Brisbane (QLD), 4001 AUSTRALIA 2
School of Physical and Chemical Sciences
Queensland University of Technology, 2 George St., Brisbane (QLD), 4001 AUSTRALIA
email:
[email protected]
Abstract— Current-voltage (I-V) curves of Poly(3-hexyl-thiophene) (P3HT) diodes have been collected to investigate the polymer hole-dominated charge transport. At room temperature and at low electric fields the I-V characteristic is purely Ohmic whereas at medium-high electric fields, experimental data shows that the hole transport is Trap Dominated - Space Charge Limited Current (TD-SCLC). In this regime, it is possible to extract the I-V characteristic of the P3HT/Al junction showing the ideal Schottky diode behaviour over five orders of magnitude. At high-applied electric fields, holes’ transport is found to be in the trap free SCLC regime. We have measured and modelled in this regime the holes’ mobility to evaluate its dependence from the electric field applied and the temperature of the device.
Keywords: P3HT, SCLC, mobility, diode.
I. INTRODUCTION Semiconducting organic polymers like Regioregular Poly(3-hexyl-thiophene) (RR-P3HT) have been proposed as the active material for applications in electronic devices such as field effect transistors, optical devices and chemical sensors1-4. For RRP3HT, high field effect mobilities of the order of 0.1 cm2/Vs have been reported5 and, as active medium in bulk heterojunction solar cells, an encouraging power conversion efficiencies approaching 5% has been obtained6.
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Typically, P3HT-based diodes are characterized by a thin layer of polymer sandwiched between two high conductivity materials representing the anode and the cathode with respectively high and low values of the work function. In these devices, high importance is given to the charge carriers’ mobility in the direction orthogonal to the active layer which is directly affected by temperature and by the electric field applied7. This study reports on the different charge transport mechanisms affecting holes’ transport in thin layer RR-P3HT diodes at low, medium and high electric fields, ranging from 103 V/cm to 7x105 V/cm. The analysis of the different behaviors observed experimentally is based on the mathematical fitting of the acquired current-voltage (IV) characteristics. Current voltage curves have been collected in the two known transport regimes, the Ohmic regime and space charge limited current regime (SCLC) which can be trap dominated (TD-SCLC) or trap free (TF-SCLC). The application of this method provides useful information about the material’s characteristics, and it has already been demonstrated that the value of holes’ mobility can be extracted successfully by fitting the high field part of the I-V characteristic4,8. Conjugated polymer diodes in low electric field show pure Ohmic behaviour9. At low-to-medium fields, the I-V characteristic can be successfully modeled with the ideal diode Schottky equation modified to take into account the series resistance and trap dominated-space charge limited current10. Therefore it is introduced the voltage drop Vb, that is related to the current by the following equation
I BVb CVb2 ,
(1)
where B and C can be expressed, according to the phenomena taken into account as following:
B
1 9 S0 , ;C RS 8 d3
(2)
with RS the series resistance, ε the polymer permittivity, d the thickness of the active layer and S the surface of the device. The term µ0 is the effective mobility11: it is related to the fraction of the trapped charge carriers and the zero field mobility µ0. The final form of the equation for modeling the current voltage characteristic is the following
q V Vb 1, I I 0 exp kT
(3)
where η is the ideality factor and I0 is the saturation current. As the applied electric field rises, traps originating by contaminants and structural defects are filled and the current increases rapidly with voltage. The TF-SCLC regime occurs for RR-P3HT at electric fields higher than 105 V/cm (Ref. 8), where all the trap sites occupied by charge carriers12,13 and therefore are neutralized. The density of current can then be expressed as a function of the electric field according to the law13:
J
9 E 2 , 8d
(4)
where the mobility dependence from the electric field and the temperature is reported in the following equation14,15:
2
0 e 0.89
E
*e / kT e 0.89
E
(5)
which, in disorder semiconductors, is related to charge carriers hopping between localized sites. The effect of the electric field on charges mobility is taken into account by the prefactor γ that corresponds to the Frenkel-Poole effect16 in disordered materials. The electric field enhances the hopping carriers to overcome the potential barriers and γ depends on the interaction between the carriers and the permanent dipoles inside the polymer. The γ dependence from temperature can be expressed with the following empirical relation17:
1 / T 1 / T0 B / k .
(6)
where k is the Boltzmann constant and T0 and B are the fitting parameters to be determined. According to Eq. 5, the mobility dependence from the temperature is referred as the zero field mobility µ0 and is characterised by the mobility prefactor µ*, the activation energy Δ and the temperature T (k is the Boltzmann constant). This energy activated mechanism has been recently demonstrated for a variety of organic semiconductors18 and has been suggested as indicative of an inhomogeneous polymer layer19. It is also related to high densities of carriers injected since, for low carriers densities, the charge transport is governed by the law ln(µ)1/T2 as demonstrated experimentally by Borsenberger et al.20.
II. EXPERIMENTAL Regioregular Poly(3-hexyl-thiophene) (Aldrich) was dispersed in chloroform (99,5% purity) in concentration of 20 mg/ml and stirred for 2 hours at 50°C. Indium Tin Oxide (ITO) 2.5x2.5 cm2 area substrates were cleaned in Standard Clean 1 solution (SC1, NH4OH/H2O2/H2O) for 30 minutes and dried on a heater. Polymer thin layers in the range of 80-100nm thickness were deposited by spin casting at 1500 rpm for 1 minute. The deposited layer was annealed for 30 minutes at 120°C in air to promote temperature assisted polymer reorganization. A final cathode contact of approximately 100nm of Al was deposited by evaporation in vacuum at 10-5 torr. The section of the devices is reported in Figure 1(a). The area of the devices was in the range 0.04-0.06 cm2. In Figure 1(b) the energy band diagram is also given. The rectifying contact is formed at the interface between RR-P3HT and Al and is generated by the difference in energy between the polymer higher occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) and the work function of Al, leading to a theoretical flat band voltage10 of VFB=0.7 V. Since the electron transitions between the reported energy levels in direct polarization are improbable because of the high energy barriers encountered, the observed transport can be considered to be constituted by holes only21. RR-P3HT diodes were characterized in the dark by contacting the devices with gold spring tips and recording the current voltage curves using a Keithley 236 precision source meter unit.
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III. RESULT AND DISCUSSION Figure 2 shows the current dependence from the voltage recorded between 10 mV and 1400 mV with a step of 10 mV at room temperature. For clarity, not all points are shown after 0.1 V. The continuous curve has been divided in two zones to show the different regimes affecting the charge transport. At low electric field, for voltage lower than 0.1 V, the charge transport is purely Ohmic and the device resistance extracted from the linear fit (continuous line, R2=0.9882) is RS=1.73±0.06x109 Ω. This allows the evaluation of the conductivity to σ=1.08±0.00x10-13 S cm. When the voltage rises, the TD-SCLC regime takes place and the current voltage curve can be described by Eq. 3 over six orders of magnitude as confirmed by the fit represented in Figure 2 as a continuous line. This region of the I-V curve is characterised by the fast increase of current with voltage. The good mathematical fit (R2=0.9999) confirms that the holes transport is limited by the SCLC regime affected by the trap sites. The fit provides a value for the series resistance of RS=5.81±0.03x105 Ω. The value of 2.21±0.01 for the ideality factor is higher than the recombination limit as already encountered in literature for RRP3HT devices22. The fit estimation for the saturation current Io is 8.1±0.2x10-12 A. From Eq. 1, the voltage Vb can be evaluated using the parameters B and C extracted from the fit and the current experimental values collected. Once Vb has been tabled, the junction voltage Vj, localised at the interface between the polymer and the Al contact, can be calculated by reversing the equation V=Vb+Vj where V is the external voltage applied. Figure 3(a) shows the plot of Vb and Vj against V. We notice that, at very low fields, the external applied voltage coincides with the junction voltage because of the small values of the current and consequently of the voltage drop Vb as expressed by Eq. 1. This behaviour can be highlighted in Figure 3(a) by reporting as a continuous line Vj=V. As the external voltage applied rises, the voltage drop due to trap dominated space charge limited regime increases. The junction voltage saturates at the value of Vj=0.77±0.01 V; after this point the voltage drop Vb increases linearly with V. The saturation voltage is extracted by fitting the Vb curve in the linear part using an angular coefficient equal to one. Using the values of Vj and I, the diode characteristic can be plotted as reported in figure 3(b). The curve is fitted over five orders of magnitude using the ideal diode Schottky equation (corresponding to Eq. 3 with Vb=0) confirming that the junction between RR-P3HT and Al forms a rectifying contact following the ideal diode model. From the linear graph, the diffusion voltage is estimated 0.70 V in very good agreement with the theoretical flat band voltage value introduced before. The high field behaviour of the devices was recorded both at room temperature and at low temperatures. The range 133K178K was selected to extend the expected Arrhenius dependence of P3HT holes’ mobility towards low temperatures limits. Figure 4 shows the plot on a logarithmic scale of J/E2 versus E1/2 at room temperature and in the low temperature range. The experimental points have been reported along with the continuous lines representing the exponential fit for each curve. According to Equations 4 and 5, the expected curves are linear, highlighting the dependence of the mobility from the applied electric field. For the room temperature data, the holes’ zero field mobility and electric field prefactor can be calculated from the curve fit that
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gives µ0=2.07±0.07x10-5cm2 V/s and γ=1.57±0.05×10-4 (m/V)1/2 respectively. Both values are in good agreement with previous results8,21. The agreement between the data and the SCLC model curve fits at very low temperatures confirms that at high electric fields the current flow is space charge limited and all the localised states acting as traps are filled. The values of µ0 and γ can be extracted from the curve fits of Figure 4 for each temperature and have been reported in the Arrhenius plot shown in Figure 5(a) and (b). The fit reported in Figure 5(a) confirms the zero field mobility dependence from temperature given by Eq. 5 down to 1000/T > 7.5 K-1. The extracted value for the activation energy of =160 meV is close to the value reported by Goh et al.8 confirming that the transport is governed by energy activated mechanism related to high densities of carriers injected. In Figure 5(b), it is possible to observe the linear increase of the electric field prefactor γ with temperature given in Eq. 6. The curve fit allows the determination of the empirical parameters B=1.40±0.07x10-5 eV/K and T0=393±30 K. For each graph, the points have been interpolated taking into account also room temperature values as shown in Figure 5(a) and (b), highlighting the consistency of the model through the extended range of temperature used.
IV. CONCLUSIONS In summary, we have demonstrated that hole dominated transport RR-P3HT diodes can be realized by sandwiching a thin layer of polymer between ITO and Aluminium. The experimental current-voltage characteristics can be fit at low electric fields with simple Ohmic model. At low-medium fields, we found that the charge carriers transport is affected by trap dominated space charge limited regime. This regime can be fit by using a modified Schottky equation which leads to the modelling of the P3HT/Al junction I-V characteristic. At higher fields, the current can be successfully modelled with space charge limited current regime equations. The analysis carried out at low temperatures demonstrates the energy activated holes’ mobility which brings to an Arrhenius-like plot represented by the law ln(µ)1/T. The complete mobility characterisation has been reached by measuring the temperature dependence of the Frenkel-Poole effect coefficient γ.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS All authors acknowledge the contribution of the Queensland Government through the NIRAP project "Solar Powered Nanosensors". M. G.iulianini is grateful to Dr Deb Stenzel for her invaluable help during experimental sessions.
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Figure 1. (a) Cross section of the RR-P3HT devices. The active medium layer thickness is 80-100 nm and it is sandwiched between the approximately 20 nm of ITO and 100 nm of aluminum deposited by thermal evaporation. (b) Energy level diagram in relation to vacuum for the devices fabricated.
Figure 2. Current-Voltage characteristic recorded every 10 mV from 0.01 V to 1.4 V at room temperature(open circles). Low field ohmic regime and TD-SCLC regime fitting curves (continuous lines). (Inset) Current voltage dependence as recorded on linear scales
Figure 3. (a) The dependence between the voltage applied V and the junction voltage Vj and the voltage drop Vb. Vj and Vb have been calculated using the fit parameters and experimental values. Fit lines have been obtained using the equations reported in the graph. (b) Diode current plotted versus the junction voltage on logarithmic (open squares) and linear (open circles) scales. The logarithmic graph has been fitted (continuous line) using ideal diode Schottky equation. The diffusion voltage assessed at 0.70V has been extrapolated with the linear fit (continuous line) reported.
Figure 4. Space charge limited current regime device behavior recorded varying the temperature between 133K and 178K. Room temperature data are also reported. Experimental data (open squares) have been fitted with exponential curves (continuous lines) to extract for each temperature the transport parameters.
Figure 5. (a) Zero field mobility µ0 values (open squares) and (b) Electric field prefactor γ (open squares) plotted vs 1000/T. For both graphs the best fit lines (continuous lines) have been extended to room temperature values (also reported) to show the consistency of data collected.
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