Physics of Organic Semiconductors, 2nd, Completely New Revised Edition

Foreword

Organic semiconductors now provide an important technology base, supported by a rapidly growing body of science. The field is not new; interest in the semiconducting properties of pi-conjugated molecules was already well established in the 1960s and the foundations of their semiconductor science were built then using molecular materials such as anthracene as model systems. As with inorganic semiconductors, the prospect of engineering toward applications has provided several major boosts to the field. The initial drive in the late 1970s was to use organic photoconductors in place of selenium as the photoactive drum in electrophotography applications. Molecular semiconductor “guests' in polymer “hosts” were successfully engineered and are now the ubiquitous technology for this application. They also provided the working systems for the understanding of electronic transport in disordered semiconductors.

The explosion of interest, dating from the late 1980s, was triggered by the observation of relatively efficient electroluminescence in thin-film diode structures, in both molecular semiconductors and solution-processed polymeric semiconductors. Though electroluminescence had been observed in single-crystal semiconductors in the 1960s, it was the prospect of practical materials processing to deliver useful devices such as pixelated displays that drew industrial and commercial attention, and this has supported a vibrant global research community. Besides light-emitting diodes, ...