The effects of strain on the electronic properties of rubrene single crystals

One of the biggest potential benefits of organic semiconductors is their flexibility – but more needs to be understood about how strain affects the properties of devices. More fundamentally, the strain response can also tell us about the mechanism of charge transport within these materials, by altering the transfer integrals and vibrational modes, but without changing the underlying molecular electronic structure. We have developed the capability to measure the field-effect mobility and Seebeck coefficient as a function of strain and we will discuss our experimental results on rubrene molecular single crystals and interpret them within the transient localisation framework.