Electronic transport in smectic liquid crystals.

Abstract

Time-of-flight measurements of transient photoconductivity have revealed bipolar electronic transport in phenylnaphthalene and biphenyl liquid crystals (LC), which exhibit several smectic mesophases. In the phenylnaphthalene LC, the hole mobility is significantly higher than the electron mobility and exhibits different temperature and phase behavior. Electron mobility in the range approximately 10(-5) cm(2)/V s is temperature activated and remains continuous at the phase transitions. However, hole mobility is nearly temperature independent within the smectic phases, but is very sensitive to smectic order, 10(-3) cm(2)/V s in the smectic-B (Sm-B) and 10(-4) cm(2)/V s in the smectic-A (Sm-A) mesophases. The different behavior for holes and electron transport is due to differing transport mechanisms. The electron mobility is apparently controlled by rate-limiting multiple shallow trapping by impurities, but hole mobility is not. To explain the lack of temperature dependence for hole mobility within the smectic phases we consider two possible polaron transport mechanisms. The first mechanism is based on the hopping of Holstein small polarons in the nonadiabatic limit. The polaron binding energy and transfer integral values, obtained from the model fit, turned out to be sensitive to the molecular order in smectic mesophases. A second possible scenario for temperature-independent hole mobility involves the competion between two different polaron mechanisms involving so-called nearly small molecular polarons and small lattice polarons. Although the extracted transfer integrals and binding energies are reasonable and consistent with the model assumptions, the limited temperature range of the various phases makes it difficult to distinguish between any of the models. In the biphenyl LCs both electron and hole mobilities exhibit temperature activated behavior in the range of 10(-5) cm(2)/V s without sensitivity to the molecular order. The dominating transport mechanism is considered as multiple trapping in the impurity sites. Temperature-activated mobility was treated within the disorder formalism, and activation energy and width of density of states have been calculated.