Foreign Particle Promoted Crystalline Nucleation for Growing High-Quality Ultrathin Rubrene Films.

Introducing foreign particles or agents as nucleator is an efficient way to promote crystallization in the crystal growth field, with the advantage to speed up the crystallizing rate and control the growth process. However, in the field of organic crystalline film growth, where the crystallization and morphology modulation are of significant importance in optoelectronics, this method has rarely been utilized. Particularly, some potential high-performance materials such as rubrene face the problem of crystallization during film formation. Here a strategy is reported to promote the crystallization of rubrene films in the initial stage assisted by foreign particles. Highly ordered thin film from the sub-monolayer stage can be achieved. Efficient charge transport and high mobility up to 2.95 cm(2) V-1 s(-1) are achieved on thus ultrathin crystalline films. Such a method enables the well controlling of the film growth from the very early stage and produces uniform crystalline films with good reproducibility, thus highly promising to yield desired optoelectrical properties and applications.