Electrical Conduction Mechanisms In Solids

Author : Manesh Zachariah
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (112 download)

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Download or read book Electronic & Ionic Conduction & Correlated Dielectric Relaxations in Molecular Solids written by Manesh Zachariah and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The study of crystalline materials has played a prominent role in solid state physics, whose basic theories were formulated for crystalline matter. However, disordered materials are more abundant in nature than crystalline ones, and, moreover, many practical applications use materials which are weakly or strongly disordered, such as molecular crystals, glasses, plastic crystals, liquids, polymers, or liquid crystals. In glasses, for example, the arrangement of the constituent atoms or molecules lacks any long-range order. From a fundamental viewpoint, we still lack an understanding of the properties of disordered materials and of the glass transition: understanding the many fascinating issues related with disorder requires in fact the use of concepts that are far from the well-known solid-state concepts associated with periodicity. From an applied perspective, the intense research in disordered solids is driven by the technological importance of these materials in daily life. From an electrical viewpoint, disordered solids can conduct electricity by transport of either electrons or ions. In the first case, disordered materials display lower electrical conductivity than their crystalline counterparts, due to localization of conduction electrons due to disorder, so that electron hopping is the main charge transport mechanism. On the other hand, the same disorder may allow the diffusion of ions through interstitial sites; the ionic conductivity of disordered materials is normally higher than the crystalline counterparts. This thesis presents an experimental study of the conduction properties and molecular dynamics of molecular solids made of fullerene derivatives (C60Br6, C60(ONa)24) and of dinitrile molecules such as succinonitrile (C2H4(CN)2) and glutaronitrile (C3H6(CN)2). The studied materials display, depending on the case, mainly electronic, protonic, or ionic conduction. The thesis provides insight into the different possible types of charge conduction in organic molecular materials and on related physical processes such as space-charge relaxations. In C60Br6 we observe n-type electronic conduction below room temperature and a non-trivial phase behavior. The temperature dependence of the dc conductivity of this organic semiconductor is in agreement with the variable-range hopping model. C60(ONa)24 has even richer phase behavior. It is synthesized as a polycrystalline hydrate, and can be obtained as pure material by heating to high temperature. We show that while the pure material is an n-type (electron) semiconductor, exposing it to humid atmosphere leads to a dramatic conductivity enhancement due to charge transport through the hydration layers, which is likely mediated by a proton exchange mechanism as in bulk water and ice. We also show that the dc conductivity of the hydrate is strongly temperature dependent across the dehydration process, and that both pure and hydrated forms display a conductivity-related dynamic process associated with accumulation of electrons at grain boundaries. The presence of water has strong impact on such frequency-dependent charge-accumulation dynamics. We finally analyze the relaxation dynamics and the ionic conductivity of plastic-crystalline ionic conductors, in particular the plastic cocrystals of succinonitrile with glutaronitrile. In plastic crystals, the molecules occupy lattice sites but undergo free rotational motions about their centers of mass. We find that succinonitrile-glutaronitrile cocrystals are the first ever known plastic crystals to display a perfect correlation between the ion drift and the on-site reorientational dynamics. Doping the cocrystals with Li salts boosts the conductivity but breaks down this perfect correlation. This indicates that the rotation-drift correlation is only valid when charge transport is dominated by self-diffusion of molecular (dinitrile) ions, and that it is a consequence of the correlation between rotational and diffusional time scales.