Negative field‐dependent charge mobility in crystalline organic semiconductors with delocalized transport

Charge-carrier mobility has been investigated by time-of-flight (TOF) transient photocurrent in a lateral transport con- figuration in highly crystalline thin films of 2,7-dioctyl[1]benzothieno [3,2-b][1] benzothiophene (C8-BTBT) grown by a zone-casting alignment technique. High TOF mobility has been revealed that it is consistent with the delocalized nature of the charge transport in this material, yet it featured a positive temperature dependence at T ≥ 295 K. Moreover, the mobility was surprisingly found to decrease with electric field in the high-temperature region. These observations are not compat- ible with the conventional band-transport mechanism. We have elaborated an analytic model based on effective-medium approximation to rationalize the puzzling findings. The model considers the delocalized charge transport within the energy landscape formed by long-range transport band-edge variations in imperfect organic crystalline materials and accounts for the field-dependent effective dimensionality of charge transport percolative paths. The results of the model calculations are found to be in good agreement with experimental data