With the impending surge of flexible organic electronic technologies, it has become essential to understand how mechanical deformation affects the electrical performance of organic thin-film devices. Organic single crystals are ideal for the systematic study of strain effects on electrical properties without being concerned about grain boundaries and other defects. Here we investigate how the deformation affects the field-effect mobility of single crystals of the benchmark semiconductor rubrene. The wrinkling instability is used to apply local strains of different magnitudes along the conducting channel in field-effect transistors. We discover that the mobility changes as dictated by the net strain at the dielectric/semiconductor interface. We propose a model based on the plate bending theory to quantify the net strain in wrinkled transistors and predict the change in mobility. These contributions represent a significant step forward in structure–function relationships in organic semiconductors, critical for the development of the next generation of flexible electronic devices.
Perovskite light-emitting diodes (LEDs) require small grain sizes to spatially confine charge carriers for efficient radiative recombination. As grain size decreases, passivation of surface defects becomes increasingly important. Additionally, polycrystalline perovskite films are highly brittle and mechanically fragile, limiting their practical applications in flexible electronics. In this work, the introduction of properly chosen bulky organo-ammonium halide additives is shown to be able to improve both optoelectronic and mechanical properties of perovskites, yielding highly efficient, robust, and flexible perovskite LEDs with external quantum efficiency of up to 13% and no degradation after bending for 10 000 cycles at a radius of 2 mm. Furthermore, insight of the improvements regarding molecular structure, size, and polarity at the atomic level is obtained with first-principles calculations, and design principles are provided to overcome trade-offs between optoelectronic and mechanical properties, thus increasing the scope for future highly efficient, robust, and flexible perovskite electronic device development.
The ease of processing hybrid organic-inorganic perovskite (HOIPs) films, belonging to a material class with composition ABX , from solution and at mild temperatures promises their use in deformable technologies, including flexible photovoltaic devices, sensors, and displays. To successfully apply these materials in deformable devices, knowledge of their mechanical response to dynamic strain is necessary. The authors elucidate the time- and rate-dependent mechanical properties of HOIPs and an inorganic perovskite (IP) single crystal by measuring nanoindentation creep and stress relaxation. The observation of pop-in events and slip bands on the surface of the indented crystals demonstrate dislocation-mediated plastic deformation. The magnitudes of creep and relaxation of both HOIPs and IPs are similar, negating prior hypothesis that the presence of organic A-site cations alters the mechanical response of these materials. Moreover, these samples exhibit a pronounced increase in creep, and stress relaxation as a function of indentation rate whose magnitudes reflect differences in the rates of nucleation and propagation of dislocations within the crystal structures of HOIPs and IP. This contribution provides understanding that is critical for designing perovskite devices capable of withstanding mechanical deformations.
A novel photopatternable high-k fluoropolymer, poly(vinylidene fluoride-bromotrifluoroethylene) P(VDF-BTFE), with a dielectric constant (k) between 8 and 11 is demonstrated in thin-film transistors. Crosslinking P(VDF-BTFE) reduces energetic disorder at the dielectric-semiconductor interface by controlling the chain conformations of P(VDF-BTFE), thereby leading to approximately a threefold enhancement in the charge mobility of rubrene single-crystal field-effect transistors.
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