Keywords

Carbon nanotube, organic electronics, electrodes, organic semiconductor, charge injection, charge transport

Abstract

Organic field effect transistors (OFETs) are of significant research interest due to their promising applications in large area, low-cost electronic devices such as flexible displays, sensor arrays, and radio-frequency identification tags. A major bottleneck in fabricating highperformance OFET is the large interfacial barrier between the metal electrodes and organic semiconductors (OSC) which results in an inefficient charge injection. Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are considered to be a promising electrode material which can address this challenge. In this dissertation, we demonstrate fabrication of high-performance OFETs using aligned array CNT electrodes and investigate the detailed electronic transport properties of the fabricated devices. The OFETs with CNT electrodes show a remarkable enhancement in the device performance such as high mobility, high current on-off ratio, higher cutoff frequency, absence of short channel effect and better charge carrier injection than those OFETs with metal electrodes. From the low temperature transport measurements, we show that the charge injection barrier at CNT/OSC interface is smaller than that of the metal/OSC interface. A transition from direct tunneling to Fowler-Nordheim tunneling observed in CNT/OSC system shows further evidence of low injection barrier. A lower activation energy measured for the OFETs with CNT electrodes gives evidence of lower interfacial trap states. Finally, OFETs are demonstrated by directly growing crystalline organic nanowires on aligned array CNT electrodes. In addition to investigating the interfacial barrier at CNT/OSC interface, we also studied photoconduction mechanism of the CNT and CNT/OSC nanocomposite thin film devices. We found that the photoconduction is due to the exciton dissociations and charge carrier separation caused by a Schottky barrier at the metallic electrode/CNT interface and diffusion of the charge iv carrier through percolating CNT networks. In addition, it is found that photoresponse of the CNT/organic semiconductor can be tuned by changing the weight percentage of CNT into the organic semiconductors.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2012

Semester

Fall

Advisor

Khondaker, Saiful

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

College

College of Sciences

Department

Physics

Degree Program

Physics

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0004596

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0004596

Language

English

Release Date

December 2013

Length of Campus-only Access

1 year

Access Status

Doctoral Dissertation (Open Access)

Subjects

Dissertations, Academic -- Sciences, Sciences -- Dissertations, Academic

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Physics Commons

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