Study of the charge transport characteristics of dendrimer molecular thin films

In this work, we systematically studied the electrical characteristics of two types of dendritic arylamine thin film devices. We observed that, for devices with different interfacial structures, their charge injection barriers and transport properties are obviously different. The smallest charge injection barrier is observed in dendrimer devices without charge-transfer interfacial layers. The Richardson-Schottky thermionic emission model can be well used to fit the experimental current-voltage characteristics at a lower voltage region. The charge injection barrier increases about 0.4 eV and 0.5 eV when a 1-decanethiol self-assembly layer and -CN terminated dendrimer thin films are inserted as the interfacial layer, respectively. It is shown that the molecule/electrode charge-transfer interfaces can largely affect the device charge injection/transport process and consequently change the device performance. In this case, the space charge limited conduction theory is more applicable to simulate the device conduction mechanism. Owing to its ultra-thin thickness, the self-assembly monolayer technique is proved to be an efficient approach in engineering the interfacial electronic structures of dendrimer thin film devices. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.