Anisotropic Electronic Transport of II-VI Organic-Inorganic Hybrid Materials

Organic-inorganic hybrid materials provide unique properties and have several advantages that are not available in either organic or inorganic materials, such as a wide range of tunable optical and electronic properties, lattice-matching flexibility, improved processability, and low-cost fabrication. However, they often suffer from poor long-term stability and crystal structure disorder. β-ZnTe(en)_0.5 is a member of II-VI-based organic-inorganic hybrid nanostructures, exhibiting a uniform and fully ordered short-period superlattice structure without physical and chemical fluctuations [1]. The thickness of the inorganic sheets is comparable to 2D materials, and the structure can be viewed as a periodically stacked 2D material. The exceptional long-term stability of β-ZnTe(en)_0.5 make it promising for (opto)electronic applications [1, 2]. We apply a Space-Charge-Limited Current method to determine the carrier mobility of β-ZnTe(en)_0.5 along different symmetry axes. Along the organic-inorganic stacking direction, the mobility is in the order of 10^-3 cm²/(Vs), and in the plane parallel to the inorganic sheets, the mobility is anisotropic, in the order of 10 - 100 cm²/(Vs).

[1] Tang et al., ACS Nano 15, 10565 (2021); [2] Tang et al., Small, doi.org/10.1002/smll.202302935