In this work, electronic excitations in organic semiconductors were investigated with electron energy-loss spectroscopy and optical absorption spectroscopy. Excitons are bound electron-hole pairs, which mostly determine the photophysical properties of the material. Excitons in organic semiconductors can interact with each other with two different mechanisms: Coulomb and charge-transfer coupling and a respective mix of both. Depending on which is dominating, different optical properties and a change of the exciton’s energy as a function of momentum are the consequences. This is called the exciton dispersion E(k) and can be measured by electron energy-loss spectroscopy. The obtained data were analysed with the assistance of calculations of the point dipole model, which is based on Coulomb coupling only.
Four different materials were chosen, which all revealed new, unexpected insights into the field of exciton dynamics in organic crystals. The main focus of this work are molecular crystals, of which two were grown with physical vapor transport within this work. Dibenzopentacene, a pentacene derivative, was grown and characterized as a single crystal for the first time. A strong structural and optical anisotropy was revealed, which indicates, that the determination of the optical properties arises not only from the intermixing of the excitons with themselves, but also with vibrational modes. The exciton dispersion showed a smaller exciton bandwidth, than in the close relative pentacene, which suggests weaker exciton interaction parameters.
As a further material, para-quaterphenyl single crystals were grown. According to the measurements a strong polarization dependence can be seen, which is underlined by calculations. Momentum dependent measurements displayed a strong dispersion of the first excitation, which could not be explained by the interaction of a molecule with the nearest neighbours, instead the next-nearest neighbours must be included to describe the dispersion appropriately.
Single crystals of perylene were provided by Xianjie Liu’s group from the Linköping University. They also showed a strong anisotropy in polarization dependent optical absorption measurements. As the point dipole calculations result in a wrong polarization dependence of the first two excitations, it can be assumed that an additional contribution in the form of charge-transfer coupling between the molecules, which can flip this polarization dependence, is necessary to model the spectra properly. Contrary to the optical absorption data, the exciton dispersion is behaving similar as Coulomb coupled systems, which is confirmed by point dipole calculations.
This work is completed with a momentum and temperature dependent series of pentacene thin films. It was shown that thin film spectra can represent single crystal spectra at small momenta. The according study revealed a strong temperature dependence of the exciton dispersion.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:84197 |
| Date | 22 March 2023 |
| Creators | Graf, Lukas |
| Contributors | Büchner, Bernd, Peisert, Heiko, Technische Universität Dresden |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:doctoralThesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
Page generated in 0.0019 seconds