Theoretical and experimental study of AC electrical conduction mechanism in the low temperature range of p-CuIn3Se5

Abstract In the present work, an attempt has been made to study theoretically and experimentally the AC electrical conduction mechanism in disordered semiconducting materials. The key parameter considered in this analysis is the frequency exponent s ( ω , T ) = ( ∂ ln ( σ A C ( ω , T ) ) ∂ ln ( ω ) ) T , where σ AC is the AC electrical conductivity that depends on angular frequency ω and temperature T. In the theoretical part of this work, the effect of the barrier hopping energy, the polaron radius and the characteristic relaxation time is considered. The theoretical models of Quantum Mechanical Tunneling (QMT), Non overlapping Small Polaron Tunneling (NSPT), Overlapping Large Polaron Tunneling (OLPT) and Correlated Barrier Hopping (CBH) are considered to fit experimental data of σ AC in p -CuIn 3 Se 5 (p-CIS135) in the low temperature range up to 96 K. Some important parameters, as the polaron radius, the localization length and the barrier hopping energies, are estimated and their temperature and frequency dependence discussed.