Injection-limited current mechanisms

Space-Charge Limited Versus Injection-Limited Current Mechanisms... 

A polymer layer al a contact can enhance current How by serving as a transport layer. The transport layer could have an increased carrier mobility or a reduced Schottky barrier. For example, consider an electron-only device made from the two-polymer-layer structure in the top panel of Figure 11-13 but using an electron contact on the left with a 0.5 eV injection barrier and a hole contact on the right with a 1.2 cV injection barrier. For this case the electron current is contact limited and thermionic emission is the dominant injection mechanism for a bias less than about 20 V. The electron density near the electron injecting contact is therefore given by... 

The photovoltage is esentially determined by the ratio of the photo- and saturation current. Since io oomrs as a pre-exponential factor in Eq. 1 it determines also the dark current. Actually this is the main reason that it limits the photovoltage via Eq. 2, The value of io depends on the mechanism of charge transfer at the interface under forward bias and is normally different for a pn-junction and a metal-semiconductor contact. In the first case electrons are injected into the p-region and holes into the n-region. These minority carriers recombine somewhere in the bulk as illustrated in Fig. 1 c. In such a minority carrier device the forward current is essentially determined... 

Important electrical informations about OLEDs, such as charge transport, charge injection, carrier mobility, etc., can be obtained from bias-dependent impedance spectroscopy, which in turn provides insight into the operating mechanisms of the OLED [14,15,73,75 78]. Campbell et al. reported electrical measurements of a PLED with a 50-nm-thick emissive layer [75], Marai et al. studied electrical measurement of capacitance-voltage and impedance frequency of ITO/l,4-Mv-(9-anthrylvinyl)-benzene/Al OLED under different bias voltage conditions [76], They found that the current is space-charge limited with traps and the conductivity exhibits power-law frequency dependence. 

Ultrafast injection of carriers into the UO2 substrate suggests that overall cell efficiency is not limited by this process but by intervening transfer mechanisms (e.g., trapped state populations reducing quantum yield) or longer time scale electron-dye recombination rates (typically taking microseconds). For example, it was found that the absorbed photon to current efficiency (APCE) is considerably reduced for V compared to IV under identical cell conditions (27,55). While V has a 350 mV lower electrochemical reduction potential than IV (and hence a red-shifted absorption spectrum), it is unclear why the redder absorbing dye (V) does not inject as efficiently (56). Recent visible excitation with broadband... 

The diffusion/recombination mechanism results in considerable overpotential for (cathodic) current flow in the dark (again assuming an n-type semiconductor for illustration). Such a rate-limiting process was found to describe the charge transfer at n-GaAs in 6 M HCl containing Cu as the hole-injecting species [159, 176]. 

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