High performance phototransistors based on single crystalline perylene- tetracarboxylic-dianhydride nanoparticle

Organic semiconducting devices suffer from grain boundary scattering, which can be responsible for low mobility and even mask intrinsic transport properties. In this letter, we show that devices containing only single grains give electron mobility 2–3 orders higher than that of conventional film-structured polycrystalline organic semiconductor transistors. The devices contain single perylene-tetracarboxylic-dianhydride nanoparticles embedded inside gated-nanopore structures. Since there is no inter-grain scattering, we obtain the highest reported electron mobility values of 0.08 cm2/Vs at 300 K and 0.5 cm2/Vs at 80 K. Consequently, the devices, when illuminated with ultraviolet, also yield a previously unrecorded high value of external quantum efficiency of 3.5 × 106.