Electron injection barrier and energy-level alignment at the Au/PDI8-CN2 interface via current–voltage measurements and ballistic emission microscopy

•Oriented thin films of PDI8-CN2 are probed within Au/organic/n-Si vertical diodes.•The Au/PDI8-CN2 interface behaves as a spatially inhomogeneous Schottky barrier.•The average electron injection barrier varies between 0.94 eV and 1.04 eV.•Inhomogeneity fits a Gaussian fluctuation model with barriers spread ∼200 meV.•Energy-level alignment is determined from experiments and literature data.

We probe electron transport across the Au/organic interface based on oriented thin films of the high-performance n-type perylene diimide semiconductor PDI8-CN2. To this purpose, we prepared organic-on-inorganic Schottky diodes, with Au directly evaporated onto PDI8-CN2 grown on n-Si. Temperature-dependent current–voltage characteristics and complementary ballistic electron emission microscopy studies reveal that rectification at the Au/PDI8-CN2 interface is controlled by a spatially inhomogeneous injection barrier, that varies on a length scale of tens of nanometers according to a Gaussian distribution with mean value ∼0.94 eV and standard deviation ∼100 meV. The former gradually shifts to ∼1.04 eV on increasing PDI8-CN2 thickness from 5 nm to 50 nm. Experimental evidences and general arguments further allow to establish the energetics at the Au/PDI8-CN2 interface. Our work indicates injection-limited current flow in PDI8-CN2-based devices with evaporated Au electrodes. Furthermore, it suggests chemical reactivity of PDI8-CN2 with both Au and Si, driven by the lateral isocyano groups.

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