Organic (opto)electronic materials have received considerable attention due to their applications in thin-film-transistors, light-emitting diodes, solar cells, sensors, photorefractive devices, and many others. The technological promises include low cost of these materials and the possibility of their room-temperature deposition from solution on large-area and/or flexible substrates. The article reviews the current understanding of the physical mechanisms that determine the (opto)electronic properties of high-performance organic materials. The focus of the review is on photoinduced processes and on electronic properties important for optoelectronic applications relying on charge carrier photogeneration. Additionally, it highlights the capabilities of various experimental techniques for characterization of these materials, summarizes top-of-the-line device performance, and outlines recent trends in the further development of the field. The properties of materials based both on small molecules and on conjug...

Organic Optoelectronic Materials: Mechanisms and Applications

Organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) show promising applications in various chemical and biological sensors. The advantages of OTFT-based sensors include high sensitivity, low cost, easy fabrication, flexibility and biocompatibility. In this paper, we review the chemical sensors and biosensors based on two types of OTFTs, including organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) and organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs), mainly focusing on the papers published in the past 10 years. Various types of OTFT-based sensors, including pH, ion, glucose, DNA, enzyme, antibody-antigen, cell-based sensors, dopamine sensor, etc., are classified and described in the paper in sequence. The sensing mechanisms and the detection limits of the devices are described in details. It is expected that OTFTs may have more important applications in chemical and biological sensing with the development of organic electronics.

Organic Thin‐Film Transistors for Chemical and Biological Sensing

Measurements and simulations of several high-mobility conjugated polymers show that their charge transport properties reflect an almost complete lack of disorder in the polymers, despite their amorphous microstructures, resulting from the resilience of the planar polymer backbone conformations to side-chain disorder. So-called 'conjugated polymers' have attracted much interest in recent decades. They are organic macromolecules with covalent-bond-containing backbone structures that combine the flexibility and processibility of plastics with the useful electronic properties of semiconductors. Polymeric materials tend to be naturally disordered however, and such disorder ultimately limits their electronic performance. Deepak Venkateshvaran and colleagues now show that several of the better-performing conjugated polymers are actually behaving electronically as if they were free of disorder, despite their amorphous microstructure. With the aid of simulations, the authors identify the molecular origins of this surprising 'disorder-free' behaviour, and offer guidelines for how this might be engineered into other conjugated polymeric systems. Conjugated polymers enable the production of flexible semiconductor devices that can be processed from solution at low temperatures. Over the past 25 years, device performance has improved greatly as a wide variety of molecular structures have been studied1. However, one major limitation has not been overcome; transport properties in polymer films are still limited by pervasive conformational and energetic disorder2,3,4,5. This not only limits the rational design of materials with higher performance, but also prevents the study of physical phenomena associated with an extended π-electron delocalization along the polymer backbone. Here we report a comparative transport study of several high-mobility conjugated polymers by field-effect-modulated Seebeck, transistor and sub-bandgap optical absorption measurements. We show that in several of these polymers, most notably in a recently reported, indacenodithiophene-based donor–acceptor copolymer with a near-amorphous microstructure6, the charge transport properties approach intrinsic disorder-free limits at which all molecular sites are thermally accessible. Molecular dynamics simulations identify the origin of this long sought-after regime as a planar, torsion-free backbone conformation that is surprisingly resilient to side-chain disorder. Our results provide molecular-design guidelines for ‘disorder-free’ conjugated polymers.

/pdf/approaching-disorder-free-transport-in-high-mobility-340czpfvy5.pdf

Approaching disorder-free transport in high-mobility conjugated polymers

This review covers advances in electrochemical and biochemical sensor development and usage during 2010 and 2011 In choosing scholarly articles to contribute to this review, special emphasis was placed on work published in the areas of reference electrodes, potentiometric sensors, voltammetric sensors, amperometric sensors, biosensors, immunosensors, and mass sensors In the past two years there have been a number of important papers, that do not fall into the general subsections contained within the larger sections Such novel advances are very important for the field of electrochemical sensors as they open up new avenues and methods for future research Each section above contains a subsection titled “Other Papers of Interest” that includes such articles and describes their importance to the field in general For example, while most electrochemical techniques for sensing analytes of interest are based on the changes in potential or current, Shan et al1 have developed a completely novel method for performing electrochemical measurements In their work, they report a method for imaging local electrochemical current using the optical signal of the electrode surface generated from a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) The electrochemical current image is based on the fact that the current density can be easily calculated from the local SPR signal The authors demonstrated this concept by imaging traces of TNT on a fingerprint on a gold substrate

Full articles and reviews were primarily amassed by searching the SciFinder Scholar and ISI Web of Knowledge Additional articles were found through alternate databases or by perusing analytical journals for pertinent publications Due to the reference limitation, only publications written in English were considered for inclusion Obviously, there have been more published accounts of groundbreaking work with electrochemical and biochemical sensors than those covered here This review is a small sampling of the available literature and not intended to cover every advance of the past two years The literature chosen focuses on new trends in materials, techniques, and clinically relevant applications of novel sensors To ensure proper coverage of these trends, theoretical publications and applications of previously reported sensor development were excluded

We want to remind our readers that this review is not intended to provide comprehensive coverage of electrochemical sensor development, but rather to provide a glimpse of the available depth of knowledge published in the past two years This review is meant to focus on novel methods and materials, with a particular focus on the increasing use of graphene sheets for sensor material development For readers seeking more information on the general principles behind electrochemical sensors and electrochemical methods, we recommend other sources with a broader scope2, 3 Electrochemical sensor research is continually providing new insights into a variety of fields and providing a breadth of relevant literature that is worthy of inclusion in this review Unfortunately, it is impossible to cover each publication and unintentional oversights are inevitable We sincerely apologize to the authors of electrochemical and biochemical sensor publications that were inadvertently overlooked

Electrochemical Sensors and Biosensors

Charge carrier recombination in organic solar cells

Buried electrodes and protection of the semiconductor with a thin passivation layer are used to yield dual-gate organic transducers. The process technology is scaled up to 150-mm wafers. The transducers are potentiometric sensors where the detection relies on measuring a shift in the threshold voltage caused by changes in the electrochemical potential at the second gate dielectric. Analytes can only be detected within the Debye screening length. The mechanism is assessed by pHmeasurements. The threshold voltage shift depends on pH as DVth¼(Ctop/Cbottom)T58mV per pH unit, indicating that the sensitivity can be enhanced with respect to conventional ion-sensitive field-effect transistors (ISFETs) by adjusting the ratio of the top and bottom gate capacitances. Remaining challenges and opportunities are discussed.

/pdf/dual-gate-organic-field-effect-transistors-as-potentiometric-2cxum6q0fz.pdf

Dual-Gate Organic Field-Effect Transistors as Potentiometric Sensors in Aqueous Solution

We analyze the effect of carrier confinement on the charge-transport properties of organic field-effect transistors. Confinement is achieved experimentally by the use of semiconductors of which the active layer is only one molecule thick. The two-dimensional confinement of charge carriers provides access to a previously unexplored charge-transport regime and is reflected by a reduced temperature dependence of the transfer curves of organic monolayer transistors.

/pdf/two-dimensional-charge-transport-in-disordered-organic-23kj3o94hy.pdf

Two-Dimensional Charge Transport in Disordered Organic Semiconductors

Device characteristics of polymer dual-gate field-effect transistors

https://pure.rug.nl/ws/files/6781164/2012OrgElectrBrondijk.pdf

Gate-bias assisted charge injection in organic field-effect transistors

The transport of holes in polymer light-emitting diodes (PLEDs) based on poly(2-methoxy, 5-(2' ethyl-hexyloxy)-p-phenylene vinylene) (MEH-PPV) is investigated as a function of layer thickness. For thicknesses smaller than 100 nm, the current in these thin PLEDs is strongly enhanced as compared to the expected space-charge limited (SCL) current. Applying the standard SCL model to measurements on a PLED with a thickness of only 40 nm results in an apparent increase of the hole mobility of a factor of 40. We show that this strong increase of the hole transport properties in these thin devices originates from the presence of an Ohmic hole contact. For Fermi-level alignment, holes diffuse from the contact into the MEH-PPV, forming an accumulation layer with a width of a few tens of nanometers. Due to the density dependence of the mobility, the hole transport in this accumulation region is strongly enhanced. For the analysis of thin PLEDs, it is therefore essential that both drift and diffusion of charge carriers are taken into account.

/pdf/diffusion-enhanced-hole-transport-in-thin-polymer-light-4rhflhtb8n.pdf

J. J. Brondijk

Papers

Dual-Gate Organic Field-Effect Transistors as Potentiometric Sensors in Aqueous Solution

Two-Dimensional Charge Transport in Disordered Organic Semiconductors

Device characteristics of polymer dual-gate field-effect transistors

Gate-bias assisted charge injection in organic field-effect transistors

Diffusion-enhanced hole transport in thin polymer light-emitting diodes