Threshold voltage and space charge in organic transistors

We investigate rubrene single-crystal field-effect transistors, whose stability and reproducibility are sufficient to measure systematically the shift in threshold voltage as a function of channel length and source-drain voltage. The shift is due to space charge transferred from the contacts and can be modeled quantitatively without free fitting parameters, using Poisson's equation, and by assuming that the density of states in rubrene is that of a conventional inorganic semiconductor. Our results demonstrate the consistency, at the quantitative level, of a variety of recent experiments on rubrene crystals and show how the use of field-effect transistor measurements can enable the determination of microscopic parameters (e.g., the effective mass of charge carriers).