Electronic transport in films of colloidal CdSe nanocrystals

Abstract

We present results for electronic transport measurements on large three-dimensional arrays of CdSe nanocrystals. In response to a step in the applied voltage, we observe a power-law decay of the current over five orders of magnitude in time. Furthermore, we observe no steady-state dark current for fields up to ${10}^6\hspace{0.5em}\mathrm{V}/\mathrm{c}\mathrm{m}$ and times as long as $2\times {10}^4\hspace{0.5em}\mathrm{s}.$ Although the power-law form of the decay is quite general, there are quantitative variations with temperature, applied field, sample history, and the material parameters of the array. Despite evidence that the charge injected into the film during the measurement causes the decay of current, we find field scaling of the current at all times. The observation of extremely long-lived current transients suggests the importance of long-range Coulomb interactions between charges on different nanocrystals.