Fabrication of organic semiconducting materials and high-performance organic thin-film transistors based on electron-irradiated polystyrene

Abstract

It was discovered that non-luminescent polystyrene (PS) can be converted to luminescent materials whose color can be changed in a wide visible range by electron irradiation. After the analyses of electron-irradiated PS, it was found that polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are produced by the irradiation and these PAHs are the origin of the luminescence from the electron-irradiated polymer. Based on the finding, a straightforward approach to produce desired light-emitting nanoarchitectures and nanopatterns only by irradiating an electron beam to the polymer was presented. In particular, the top-down irradiation approach provides a powerful tool to fabricate a variety of interesting nanoarchitectures when combined with bottom-up approaches; PS nanostructures prepared by self-assembling techniques can be directly transformed to luminescent nanostructures by electron irradiation while keeping their pristine morphologies. Light-emitting materials are widely used for optical, photonic, chemical and biomedical devices and a rapid progress in the devices requires well-defined luminescent nanoarchitectures. The approach presented here will be useful for a wide range of research fields including optics, photonics, chemistry, and biologics. On the other hand, a very simple but effective approach to produce high-performance rubrene organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) with characteristics better than amorphous silicon TFTs was presented. Only by an abrupt heating process, high-quality crystalline rubrene semiconductor thin films that have almost ideal structures for OTFTs are created. The produced crystalline thin films consist of highly ordered, uniaxially oriented single-crystalline grains with large average sizes and the grains are interconnected with one another to form continuous films over the whole dielectric surfaces. Such high-quality crystalline rubrene thin films are remarkably rapidly produced in just 30 sec through this approach. Moreover, the increase of car...