Why Disordered Materials?

So why disordered materials? Arguing from an application based (=engineer) point of view, disordered materials are usually easier and cheaper to be manufactured than (single or poly) crystalline ones. Looking at organic semiconductors, such as conjugated polymers or fullerene derivatives (“bucky balls”): they are soluble and can thus be deposited from the liquid phase – e.g., by printing (offset, inkjet, you name it). Device configuration of a Disordered Organic Solar Cell made of conjugated polymers (red chains) blended with fullerene molecules (bucky balls) The vision for the so called plastic electronics is to print circuits and devices on flexible substrates. This can be done at room temperature (low energy) and ideally with roll-to-roll processes (high throughput). Sounds good, eh?

Well, there are some drawbacks in terms of the application… though not for researchers;-) Printing semiconductors usually leads to rather disordered films, which have very low charge carrier mobilities as compared to Silicon and other inorganic semiconductors, and are thus not suitable for high-frequency applications. However, for photovoltaic devices, the low mobilities are not that much of a drawback. That said, organic solar cells are still at below 7% power conversion efficiencies… for very small areas. Single crystalline Silicon, on the other hand, sees already above 20% for modules.

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