Magnetic field effect in non-magnetic organic semiconductor thin film devices and its applications

Organic pi-conjugated materials have been used to manufacture devices such as organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), photovoltaic cells and field-effect transistors. Recently there has been growing interest in spin and magnetic field effects in these materials.; In this thesis, I report on the discovery and experimental characterization of a large and intriguing magnetoresistance effect, which we dubbed organic magnetoresistance (OMAR), in various pi-conjugated polymer and small molecular OLEDs. OMAR may find application in magnetic field sensors in OLED interactive displays (patent pending).; We discovered OMAR originally in devices made from the pi-conjugated polymer polyfluorene. We found ≈ 10% magnetoresistance at 10 mT fields at room temperature. The effect is independent of the field direction, and is only weakly temperature dependent. We show that OMAR is a bulk effect related to the majority carrier transport. Studying polymer films with different amount of disorder we found that low disorder/large mobility is not a necessary prerequisite for large OMAR response. We also studied a possible interrelation between spin-orbit coupling and the OMAR effect in platinum-containing polymers. We found that spin-orbit coupling has apparently little effect on OMAR.; A large OMAR effect was also observed in devices made from the prototypical small molecule, Alq3 that is similar in size to that in the polyfluorene devices. Our study shows that the basic properties are equivalent to polymer devices.; To the best of our knowledge, OMAR is not adequately described by any of the magnetoresistance mechanisms known to date. A future explanation for this effect may lead to a breakthrough in the scientific understanding of organic semiconductors.; In a largely unrelated effort, we also modelled spin-dependent exciton formation in OLEDs. Our work leads to the following picture of exciton formation: Since the triplet exciton states lie lower in energy than singlets, more phonons must be omitted for triplet formation than singlet formation. Since polymers have a small Huang-Rhys factor, then the emission of many phonons is unlikely, thus favoring singlet formation. In short oligomers, however, the Huang-Rhys factor is quite large, phonons are emitted easily, and singlet and triplet formation both become likely.