Coulomb-blockade transport in single-crystal organic thin-film transistors

W. A. Schoonveld (), J. Wildeman, D. Fichou, P. A. Bobbert, B. J. van Wees and T. M. Klapwijk
Additional contact information
W. A. Schoonveld: Department of Applied Physics
J. Wildeman: Materials Science Center
D. Fichou: Laboratoire des Matériaux Moléculaires, CNRS
P. A. Bobbert: Eindhoven University of Technology
B. J. van Wees: Department of Applied Physics
T. M. Klapwijk: Delft University of Technology, Nanophysics and Nanotechnology Section

Nature, 2000, vol. 404, issue 6781, 977-980

Abstract: Abstract Coulomb-blockade transport—whereby the Coulomb interaction between electrons can prohibit their transport around a circuit—occurs in systems in which both the tunnel resistance, RT, between neighbouring sites is large (≫h/e2) and the charging energy, EC (EC = e2/2C, where C is the capacitance of the site), of an excess electron on a site is large compared to kT. (Here e is the charge of an electron, k is Boltzmann's constant, and h is Planck's constant.) The nature of the individual sites—metallic, superconducting, semiconducting or quantum dot—is to first order irrelevant for this phenomenon to be observed1. Coulomb blockade has also been observed in two-dimensional arrays of normal-metal tunnel junctions2, but the relatively large capacitances of these micrometre-sized metal islands results in a small charging energy, and so the effect can be seen only at extremely low temperatures. Here we demonstrate that organic thin-film transistors based on highly ordered molecular materials can, to first order, also be considered as an array of sites separated by tunnel resistances. And as a result of the sub-nanometre sizes of the sites (the individual molecules), and hence their small capacitances, the charging energy dominates at room temperature. Conductivity measurements as a function of both gate bias and temperature reveal the presence of thermally activated transport, consistent with the conventional model of Coulomb blockade.

Date: 2000
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/35010073 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:404:y:2000:i:6781:d:10.1038_35010073

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/35010073

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().