Charge-carrier relaxation in disordered organic semiconductors studied by dark injection: Experiment and modeling

Understanding of stationary charge transport in disordered organic semiconductors has matured during recent years. However, charge-carrier relaxation in nonstationary situations is still poorly understood. Such relaxation can be studied in dark injection experiments, in which the bias applied over an unilluminated organic semiconductor device is abruptly increased. The resulting transient current reveals both charge-carrier transport and relaxation characteristics. We performed such experiments on hole-only devices of a polyfluorene-based organic semiconductor. Modeling the dark injection by solving a one-dimensional master equation using the equilibrium carrier mobility leads to a too-slow current transient, since this approach does not account for carrier relaxation. Modeling by solving a three-dimensional time-dependent master equation does take into account all carrier transport and relaxation effects. With this modeling, the time scale of the current transient is found to be in agreement with experiment. With a disorder strength somewhat smaller than extracted from the temperature-dependent stationary current-voltage characteristics, also the shape of the experimental transients is well described.