Full quantum treatment of charge dynamics in amorphous molecular semiconductors

We present a treatment of charge dynamics in amorphous molecular semiconductors that accounts for the coupling of charges to all intramolecular phonon modes in a fully quantum mechanical way. Based on ab initio calculations, we derive charge transfer rates that improve on the widely used semiclassical Marcus rate and obtain benchmark results for the mobility and energetic relaxation of electrons and holes in three semiconductors commonly applied in organic light-emitting diodes. Surprisingly, we find very similar results when using the simple Miller-Abrahams rate. We conclude that extracting the disorder strength from temperature-dependent charge transport studies is very possible but extracting the reorganization energy is not.