Electronic transport within a quasi-two-dimensional model for rubrene single-crystal field effect transistors

Spectral and transport properties of the quasi-two-dimensional adiabatic Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model are studied, adjusting the parameters in order to model rubrene single-crystal field effect transistors with small but finite density of injected charge carriers. We show that, with increasing temperature T, the chemical potential moves into the tail of the density of states corresponding to localized states, but this is not enough to drive the system into an insulating state. The mobility along different crystallographic directions is calculated, including vertex corrections that give rise to a transport lifetime one order of magnitude smaller than the spectral lifetime of the states involved in the transport mechanism. With increasing temperature, the transport properties reach the Ioffe-Regel limit, which is ascribed to less and less appreciable contribution of itinerant states to the conduction process. The model provides features of the mobility in close agreement with experiments: right order of magnitude, scaling as a power law T−γ (with γ close or larger than two), and correct anisotropy ratio between different in-plane directions. Due to a realistic high-dimensional model, the results are not biased by uncontrolled approximations.