Title
Thermal Fluctuations Lead to Cumulative Disorder and Enhance Charge Transport in Conjugated Polymers
Date Issued
01 January 2019
Access level
open access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Zhang W.
Bombile J.
Weisen A.
Xie R.
Colby R.
Janik M.
Milner S.
Pennsylvania State University
Publisher(s)
Wiley-VCH Verlag
Abstract
All conjugated polymers examined to date exhibit significant cumulative lattice disorder, although the origin of this disorder remains unclear. Using atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, the detailed structures for single crystals of a commonly studied conjugated polymer, poly(3-hexylthiophene-2,5-diyl) (P3HT) are obtained. It is shown that thermal fluctuations of thiophene rings lead to cumulative disorder of the lattice with an effective paracrystallinity of about 0.05 in the π–π stacking direction. The thermal-fluctuation-induced lattice disorder can in turn limit the apparent coherence length that can be observed in diffraction experiments. Calculating mobilities from simulated crystal structures demonstrates that thermal-fluctuation-induced lattice disorder even enhances charge transport in P3HT. The mean inter-chain charge transfer integral is enhanced with increasing cumulative lattice disorder, which in turn leads to pathways for fast charge transport through crystals.
Volume
40
Issue
15
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Química física Física y Astronomía
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85066901458
PubMed ID
Source
Macromolecular Rapid Communications
ISSN of the container
10221336
Sponsor(s)
Funding support from the National Science Foundation under Award number DMR-1629006 is gratefully acknowledged.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus