Monte Carlo Studies of Charge Transport Below the Mobility Edge

• Charge transport below the mobility edge, where the charge carriers are hopping between localized electronic states, is the dominant charge transport mechanism in a wide range of disordered materials. This type of incoherent charge transport is fundamentally different from the coherent charge transport in ordered crystalline materials. With the advent of organic electronics, where small organic molecules or polymers replace traditional inorganic semiconductors, the interest for this type of hopping charge transport has increased greatly. The work documented in this thesis has been dedicated to the understanding of this charge transport below the mobility edge.While analytical solutions exist for the transport coefficients in several simplified models of hopping charge transport, no analytical solutions yet exist that can describe these coefficients in most real systems. Due to this, Monte Carlo simulations, sometimes described as ideal experiments performed by computers, have been extensively used in this work.A particularly interesting organic system is deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Besides its overwhelming biological importance, DNA’s recognition and self-assembly properties have made it an interesting candidate as a molecular wire in the field of molecular electronics. In this work, it is shown that incoherent hopping and the Nobel prize-awarded Marcus theory can be used to describe the results of experimental studies on DNA. Furthermore, using this experimentally verified model, predictions of the bottlenecks in DNA conduction are made.The second part of this work concerns charge transport in conjugated polymers, the flagship of organic materials with respect to processability. It is shown that polaronic effects, accounted for by Marcus theory but not by the more commonly used Miller-Abrahams theory, can be very important for the charge transport process. A significant step is also taken in the modeling of the off-diagonal disorder in organic systems. By taking the geometry of the system from large-scale molecular dynamics simulations and calculating the electronic transfer integrals using Mulliken theory, the off-diagonal disorder is for the first time modeled directly from theory without the need for an assumed parametric random distribution.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Fysik -- Annan fysik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Physical Sciences -- Other Physics Topics (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Monte Carlo simulation

charge transport

organic materials

conjugated polymers

DNA

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

dok (subject category)