Beschreibung:
<jats:p>Pentacene has been extensively studied as an active material for organic field-effect transistors as it shows very good charge carrier mobility along its preferred transport direction. In this contribution, we investigate the hole transport in pentacene thin films by measurement in conventional lateral organic field-effect transistors (OFETs), which yields the hole mobility along the a-b plane of pentacene, and by the recently published potential mapping (POEM) approach, which allows for direct extraction of the charge carrier mobility perpendicular to the substrate, in this case perpendicular to the a-b plane, without the assumption of a specific transport model. While the mobility along the a-b plane—determined from OFET measurements—is found to be in the region of 0.45 cm2/Vs, transport perpendicular to this plane shows an average mobility at least one order of magnitude lower. Investigating also how these effective mobility values depend on the deposition rate of the pentacene films, we find that the decrease in grain size for increasing deposition rate causes the mobility to decrease both parallel and perpendicular to the substrate due to the increased number of grain boundaries to be overcome. For the out-of-plane transport, this effect is found to saturate for deposition rates higher than 2.5 Å/s.</jats:p>