Approaching disorder-free transport in high-mobility conjugated polymers

Measurements and simulations of several high-mobility conjugated polymers show that their charge transport properties reflect an almost complete lack of disorder in the polymers, despite their amorphous microstructures, resulting from the resilience of the planar polymer backbone conformations to side-chain disorder. So-called 'conjugated polymers' have attracted much interest in recent decades. They are organic macromolecules with covalent-bond-containing backbone structures that combine the flexibility and processibility of plastics with the useful electronic properties of semiconductors. Polymeric materials tend to be naturally disordered however, and such disorder ultimately limits their electronic performance. Deepak Venkateshvaran and colleagues now show that several of the better-performing conjugated polymers are actually behaving electronically as if they were free of disorder, despite their amorphous microstructure. With the aid of simulations, the authors identify the molecular origins of this surprising 'disorder-free' behaviour, and offer guidelines for how this might be engineered into other conjugated polymeric systems. Conjugated polymers enable the production of flexible semiconductor devices that can be processed from solution at low temperatures. Over the past 25 years, device performance has improved greatly as a wide variety of molecular structures have been studied1. However, one major limitation has not been overcome; transport properties in polymer films are still limited by pervasive conformational and energetic disorder2,3,4,5. This not only limits the rational design of materials with higher performance, but also prevents the study of physical phenomena associated with an extended π-electron delocalization along the polymer backbone. Here we report a comparative transport study of several high-mobility conjugated polymers by field-effect-modulated Seebeck, transistor and sub-bandgap optical absorption measurements. We show that in several of these polymers, most notably in a recently reported, indacenodithiophene-based donor–acceptor copolymer with a near-amorphous microstructure6, the charge transport properties approach intrinsic disorder-free limits at which all molecular sites are thermally accessible. Molecular dynamics simulations identify the origin of this long sought-after regime as a planar, torsion-free backbone conformation that is surprisingly resilient to side-chain disorder. Our results provide molecular-design guidelines for ‘disorder-free’ conjugated polymers.