Breakdown of Polarons in Conducting Polymers at Device Field Strengths

Abstract

Conducting polymers have become standard engineering materials, used in manyelectronic devices. Despite this, there is a lack of understanding of the microscopicorigin of the conducting properties, especially at realistic device field strengths. Wepresent simulations of doped poly(p-phenylene) (PPP) using a Su-Schrieffer-Heeger(SSH) tight-binding model, with the electric field included in the Hamiltonian througha time-dependent vector potential via Peierls substitution of the phase factor. We findthat polarons typically break down within less than a picosecond after the field hasbeen switched on, already for electric fields as low as around 1.6 mV/Å. This is a fieldstrength common in many flexible organic electronic devices. Our results challenge therelevance of the polaron as charge carrier in conducting polymers for a wide range ofapplications.

25 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Quasi one-Dimensional Band Dispersion and Metallization In long Range Ordered Polymeric wires
• Band renormalization of a polymer physisorbed on graphene investigated by many-body perturbation theory

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Bipolarons in a Bose-Einstein Condensate
• Dynamical formation of polarons in a Bose-Einstein condensate: A variational approach
• Pattern formation in one-dimensional polaron systems and temporal orthogonality catastrophe
• Stability of moving solitons in trans-polyacetylene in an electric field
• Competition of light- and phonon-dressing in microwave-dressed Bose polarons