0000000000608993
AUTHOR
F. Closs
Discotic Liquid Crystals - A New Class of Fast Photoconductors
We showed for the first time that discotic liquid crystals are well suited for a new class of fast photoconducting materials. Due to their spontaneous orientation and their dynamical fluctuations in the mesophase, they show exceptionally high mobilities of 1·10−3 cm2/Vs, about two to three orders of magnitude higher than those obtained for conventional amorphous polymers. Further on, the Gaussian transport (for holes in the mesophase) is remarkable, which is characterized by the existence of a conduction band and the absence of trapping states. In contrast, the charge carrier transport in amorphous photoconductors is generally trap-dominated which limits technical properties, leading to low…
Transient photoconductivity in a discotic liquid crystal
Using a time-of-flight technique, different transport mechanisms, deep trapping, multiple shallow trapping, and ideal itrinsic transport, can be observed in the different temperature and phase regions of the liquid-crystalline photoconductor hexapentyloxytriphenylene. The temperature and field dependences of carrier mobilities up to 1\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}${10}^{\mathrm{\ensuremath{-}}3}$ ${\mathrm{cm}}^{2}$/V s have been determined; this value exceeds considerably the mobilities of the most commonly used organic photoconductors. The experiments reflect a variety of transport phenomena which are novel in the field of liquid-crystalline systems.