Photoconduction in fullerene films

Abstract

We report results from a detailed study of photoconduction in C60 films. At low temperatures the photoaction spectra show vibrational coupling to the first electronic transition, indicating that the generation of mobile carriers in the solid involves molecular excitation schemes. The lowest energy transition is found to occur at photon energies of ∼1.8 eV. Below this energy, only weak and field-dependent photoresponse is observed. We attribute this to a tail of localized states related to defects in the film. The edge between localized and extended states approximately coincides with the first vibronic peak. From this peak we find the photoconduction edge of the film to be 1.81±0.01 eV at room temperature in the face-centered-cubic phase and 1.85±0.01 eV in the simple cubic phase below ∼200 K.