Electrical Conductivity of Doped Organic Semiconductors Limited by Carrier–Carrier Interactions

Abstract

High electrical conductivity is a prerequisite for improving the performance of organic semiconductors for various applications and can be achieved through molecular doping. However, often the conductivity is enhanced only up to a certain optimum doping concentration, beyond which it decreases significantly. We combine analytical work and Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that carrier–carrier interactions can cause this conductivity decrease and reduce the maximum conductivity by orders of magnitude, possibly in a broad range of materials. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we disentangle the effect of carrier–carrier interactions from carrier–dopant interactions. Coulomb potentials of ionized dopants are shown to decrease the conductivity, but barely influence the trend of conductivity versus doping concentration. We illustrate these findings using a doped fullerene derivative for which we can correctly estimate the carrier density at which the conductivity maximizes. We use grazing-incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering to show that the decrease of the conductivity cannot be explained by changes to the microstructure. We propose the reduction of carrier–carrier interactions as a strategy to unlock higher-conductivity organic semiconductors.