Charge transport in oligo phenylene and phenylene–thiophene nanofibers

Charge carrier mobilities have been measured in elongated crystalline aggregates with nanoscale cross-sectional dimensions. These molecular crystals are grown via dedicated epitaxial surface growth. They consist of well-ordered phenylene–thiophene (co-) oligomers that have been systematically tailored to study mobility of oligomers containing six rings and a variable number of thiophene rings. These organic nanoscale one-dimensional systems demonstrate charge mobilities as high as 1 cm2 V−1 s−1. Density functional theory calculations have been performed in order to correlate the experimentally observed trends in mobility with molecular charge transport properties.