Trapping carriers in organic field-effect transistors by metal nanoparticles

A thin layer of metallic Au nanoparticles was coated on substrates that were used for organic field-effect transistors, in order to study how the motion of carriers in the organic was affected by metal/organic coupling. A huge reduction of mobility was observed, due to the increase of the characteristic activation energy. We speculate that this follows from the polaronic motion of carriers resulted from the organic/metal coupling, similar to the organic/dielectric coupling. Further experiments demonstrate that the performance of those devices can be adjusted by changing the configurations of nanoparticles.