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Highly efficient modulation of the electronic properties of organic semiconductors by surface doping with 2D molecular crystals

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Abstract

Doping is a critically important strategy to modulate the properties of organic semiconductors (OSCs) to improve their optoelectrical performances. Conventional bulk doping involves the incorporation of foreign molecular species (i.e., dopants) into the lattice of the host OSCs, and thus disrupts the packing of the host OSCs and induces structural defects, which tends to reduce the mobility and (or) the on/off ratio in organic field-effect transistors (OFETs). In this article, we report a highly efficient and highly controllable surface doping strategy utilizing 2D molecular crystals (2DMCs) as dopants to boost the mobility and to modulate the threshold voltage of OFETs. The amount of dopants, i.e., the thickness of the 2DMCs, is controlled at monolayer precision, enabling fine tuning of the electrical properties of the OSCs at unprecedented accuracy. As a result, a prominent increase of the average mobility from 1.31 to 4.71 cm2 V−1s−1 and a substantial reduction of the threshold voltage from −18.5 to −1.8 V are observed. Meanwhile, high on/off ratios of up to 108 are retained.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51873148, 61674116, 51633006), the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2016YFA0202302) and the Natural Science Foundation of Tianjin City (18JC-YBJC18400).

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  1. These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tianjin Key Laboratory of Molecular Optoelectronic Sciences, Department of Chemistry, School of Science, Tianjin University & Collaborative Innovation Center of Chemical Science and Engineering (Tianjin), Tianjin, 300072, China

    Yu Zhang, Shuyuan Yang, Xiaotao Zhang, Rongjin Li & Wenping Hu

  2. Joint School of National University of Singapore and Tianjin University, International Campus of Tianjin University, Binhai New City, Fuzhou, 350207, China

    Xiaoting Zhu & Wenping Hu

  3. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, China

    Fei Zhai, Yiyu Feng & Wei Feng

  4. Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Wenping Hu

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  1. Yu Zhang
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Correspondence to Rongjin Li.

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Highly efficient modulation of the electronic properties of organic semiconductors by surface doping with 2D molecular crystals

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Zhang, Y., Yang, S., Zhu, X. et al. Highly efficient modulation of the electronic properties of organic semiconductors by surface doping with 2D molecular crystals. Sci. China Chem. 63, 973–979 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-020-9765-8

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