Exploring the Energy Landscape of the Charge Transport Levels in Organic Semiconductors at the Molecular Scale

The extraordinary semiconducting properties of conjugated organic materials continue to attract attention across disciplines including materials science, engineering, chemistry, and physics, particularly with application to organic electronics. Such materials are used as active components in light-emitting diodes, field-effect transistors, or photovoltaic cells, as a substitute for (mostly Si-based) inorganic semiconducting materials. Many strategies developed for inorganic semiconductor device building (doping, p–n junctions, etc.) have been attempted, often successfully, with organics, even though the key electronic and photophysical properties of organic thin films are fundamentally different from those of their bulk inorganic counterparts.In particular, organic materials consist of individual units (molecules or conjugated segments) that are coupled by weak intermolecular forces. The flexibility of organic synthesis has allowed the development of more efficient opto-electronic devices including impres...