Master equation approach to charge injection and transport in organic insulators

We develop a master equation model of a disordered organic insulator sandwiched between metallic electrodes by treating as rate processes both the injection and the internal transport. We show how the master equation model allows for the inclusion of crucial correlation effects in the charge transport, particularly of the Pauli exclusion principle and of space-charge effects, besides, being dependent on just the microscopic form of the transfer rate between the localized electronic states, it allows for the investigation of different microscopic scenarios in the organic, such as polaronic hopping, correlated energy levels, interaction with image charge, etc. The model allows for a separate analysis of the injection and the recombination currents. We find that the disorder, besides increasing the injection current, eliminates the possibility of observation of a Fowler-Nordheim injection current at zero temperature, and that it does not alter the Schottky barrier size of the zero-field thermionic injection current from the value based on the energy difference between the electrode Fermi level and the highest occupied molecular orbital/lowest unoccupied molecular orbital levels in the organic, but it makes the Arrhenius temperature dependence appear at larger temperatures. We investigate how the I(V) characteristics of a device is affected by the presence of correlations in the site energy distribution and by the form of the internal hopping rate, specifically the Miller-Abrahams rate and the Marcus or small-polaron rate. We show that the disorder does not modify significantly the e(beta root E) field dependence of the net current due to the Schottky barrier lowering caused by the attraction between the charge and its image in the electrode.