Analysis of the charge transfer and separation in electrically doped organic semiconductors by electron spin resonance spectroscopy

Abstract

Abstract We investigated the charge generation mechanism of electrically doped organic semiconductors (OSs) by electron spin resonance (ESR) analysis. ESR spectroscopy was used to successfully evaluate the radical density of p-doped OSs to estimate the charge transfer efficiency (CTE) of various doped systems. The results showed that the CTE is efficient close to 100% if the dopant molecules are homogenously dispersed and the energy difference (ΔE) between the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) level of the host molecule and lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) level of the p-dopant is large. The charge separation efficiency to form free carriers from the radicals is rather low (less than 12% in this study) and is a dominant factor controlling the charge generation efficiency (CGE). An organic dopant molybdenum tris[1,2-bis(trifluoromethyl)ethane-1,2-dithiolene] turns out to be an efficient dopant with the CGE of 9.7% due to high CTE originating from homogenous dispersion of the organic p-dopants and low LUMO level, i.e., large ΔE.