Facile Fabrication and Characterization of Oriented and Multilayer Thin Films of Solution Processable Conjugated Polymer

Abstract

Fabrication of multilayer thin films of solution-processable organic semiconductors has great potential in organic electronics, but adopting existing thin-film techniques to attain this is highly cumbersome. Herein, a unique unidirectional floating film transfer method has been utilized, which allows the facile fabrication of large area and oriented thin films of conjugated polymers. This method has successfully fabricated and characterized multilayer and oriented thin films of regioregular poly(3-hexylthiophene) without having any adverse effect on the underlying layers. Optical characterizations reveal that fabricated thin films are anisotropic with a dichroic ratio of 2.2 having a single layer thickness of 14.5 nm. X-ray diffraction results demonstrate uniformity in the crystallinity of the multilayered thin film with comparable crystallite size and interplanar spacing with purely edge-on molecular orientation. The organic field effect transistor fabricates using multilayer thin films and also exhibits a uniform and saturated charge carrier mobility of about 0.1 cm2 V−1 s−1. © 2023 The Authors. physica status solidi (a) applications and materials science published by Wiley-VCH GmbH.