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p-Type molecular doping of organic materials with high ionization energies (IEs) of above 5.50 eV is still a challenge, limiting the use of doping in high-performance organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). Here, we investigate the molecular dopant hexacyano-trimethylene-cyclopropane (CN6-CP) with a high electron affinity of 5.87 eV as p-dopant in OLEDs. We show that CN6-CP can be used not only as a dopant in the traditional hole transport material 4,4'-cyclohexylidenebis[ N, N-bis(4-methylphenyl)benzenamine] (TAPC, IE = 5.50 eV) but also effectively dopes the host material tris(4-carbazoyl-9-ylphenyl)amine (TCTA, IE = 5.85 eV), reaching a conductivity of 1.86 × 10

Increasing the amount of charge carriers by molecular doping is important to improve the function of several organic electronic devices. In this work, we use highly fluorinated fullerene (C60F48) to p-type dope common amorphous molecular host materials. We observe a general relation between the material's electrical conductivity and Seebeck coefficient, both strongly depending on the energy level offset between the amorphous host and the dopant. This suggests that the doping efficiency at similar doping levels is mainly determined by the electron transfer yield from host to dopant. Indeed, the dopant anion and host cation absorption strength correlate with the ionization energy (IE) of the host material. Host materials with an IE significantly below the electron affinity of the dopant yield the highest doping efficiency. Surprisingly, the doping efficiency reduces only by about 1 order of magnitude when the IE of the host material is increased by 0.55 eV, which we attribute to the disordered nature of the host materials. K.V. and B.N. thank the "Thinface" project from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (no. 607232) and the Graduate Academy of TU Dresden for financial support. O.V.B. thanks the National Science Foundation for partial support (grant CHE-1362302). The authors thank L. Shi and Y. Liu for recording absorption spectra of TCTA and doped BF-DPB and Y. Karpov and A. Kiriy for providing the CN6-CP dopant.

We thank O. Kaveh and D. Schutze for performing conductivity measurements, D. Wohrle for supplying F 8 ZnPc, and M.L. Tietze for insightful discussions. M.S. acknowledges financial support by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the project MatWorldNet LE-747/44-1, the German Academic Exchange Service within the frame of the IPID4all Program and the Graduate Academy of TU Dresden. A.H. acknowledges financial support from the project UNVEiL of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). S.K. thanks JSPS for financial support (KAKENHI 26248062). N.U. acknowledges support of the Global-COE Program of MEXT (G03) and 21st Century-COE Program of MEXT(G-4) for developing an ultrahigh-sensitivity UPS system. B.N. received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 607232 (THINFACE). F.O. would like to thank the DFG for financial support (project OR-349/1). Grants for computing time from the Zentrum fur Informationsdienste und Hochleistungsrechnen Dresden (ZIH) are gratefully acknowledged.

Fermi level control by doping is established since decades in inorganic semiconductors and has been successfully introduced in organic semiconductors. Despite its commercial success in the multi-billion OLED display business, molecular doping is little understood, with its elementary steps controversially discussed and mostly-empirical-materials design. Particularly puzzling is the efficient carrier release, despite a presumably large Coulomb barrier. Here we quantitatively investigate doping as a two-step process, involving single-electron transfer from donor to acceptor molecules and subsequent dissociation of the ground-state integer-charge transfer complex (ICTC). We show that carrier release by ICTC dissociation has an activation energy of only a few tens of meV, despite a Coulomb binding of several 100 meV. We resolve this discrepancy by taking energetic disorder into account. The overall doping process is explained by an extended semiconductor model in which occupation of ICTCs causes the classically known reserve regime at device-relevant doping concentrations., Molecular doping is routinely used in organic semiconductor devices nowadays, but the physics at play remains unclarified. Tietze et al. describe it as a two-step process and show it costs little, energetically, to dissociate charge transfer complexes due to energetic disorder of organic semiconductors.