Abstract

Thermal vibrations and the dynamic disorder they create can detrimentally affect the transport properties of van der Waals bonded molecular semiconductors. The low-energy nature of these vibrations makes it difficult to access them experimentally, which is why we still lack clear molecular design rules to control and reduce dynamic disorder. In this study we discuss the promising organic semiconductors rubrene, 2,7-dioctyl[1]benzothieno[3,2-b][1]benzothio-phene and 2,9-di-decyl-dinaphtho-[2,3-b:20,30-f]-thieno-[3,2-b]-thiophene in terms of an exceptionally low degree of dynamic disorder. In particular, we analyse diffuse scattering in transmission electron microscopy, to show that small molecules that have their side chains attached along the long axis of their conjugated core are better encapsulated in their crystal structure, which helps reduce large-amplitude thermal motions. Our work provides a general strategy for the design of new classes of very high mobility organic semiconductors with a low degree of dynamic disorder.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-22-2016

Notes/Citation Information

Published in Nature Communications, v. 7, article no. 10736, p. 1-10.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10736

Funding Information

S.I. acknowledges funding from the EPSRC, the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability and the Cambridge Home and EU scholarship scheme (CHESS). A.E. acknowledges the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission: ESTEEM2 (contract number 312483) as well as the Royal Society. G.S. acknowledges postdoctoral fellowship support from the Wiener-Anspach Foundation.

Related Content

Additional data related to this publication is available at the University of Cambridge data repository (https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/253572).

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Supplementary Information: Supplementary Figures 1-16, Supplementary Tables 1-2, Supplementary Notes 1-4, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary References
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