Voltage-Induced Metal-Insulator Transition in Polythiophene Field-Effect Transistors

Abstract

We have extensively studied the carrier transport in regio-regular polythiophene field-effect transistors (FETs) from room temperature to 4.2 K. At low temperatures, Zabrodskii plots (dlnsigma/dlnT) demonstrate that the gate voltage and source-drain voltage combine to induce the insulator-to-metal transition at a carrier density of 5x10(12) cm-2. The carrier transport in the insulating regime is well described by phonon assisted hopping in a disordered Fermi glass with Coulomb interaction between the hopping charge carrier and the opposite charge left behind, as described by Efros and Shklovskii.