Field-induced crossover from phonon to field assisted hopping conductivity in organic materials

Abstract

Recently the change in temperature dependence of conductivity observed in polythiophene field-effect transistors has been attributed to field-induced metal-insulator transition. Under a high source-drain voltage, the conductivity becomes independent from temperature and depends exponentially on the inverse of the square root of electric field. In this paper we present a theoretical interpretation of this behavior in the framework of hopping mechanism. The ingredient of this model, is the energy gained from the electrical field is always larger than the energy difference between the localized states involved into the charge transitions, which induces a crossover from phonon-assisted hopping to field-assisted hopping.