Kinetic Monte Carlo Simulation of Hopping Transport of Electrons in Homogeneous Organic Semiconductors

University of Tsukuba, Japan

Fresh out of my second year of undergrad, I was dreaming of being under my favorite teacher's lab: Prof. Sano Nobuyuki. He was by far our best professor, very knowledgeable, well spoken and above all, truly passionate about physics. His lab, the device physics lab, focused on semiconductor transport problems and Prof. Sano was a well known reference in that field.  As part of my program's requirement, I finally joined his lab as an undergraduate researcher. As I spent more and more time researching and interacting with him, his passion demanded strictness and seriousness, which I was not used to. More than quantum mechanics or semiconductor physics, researching with him pushed me into an uncomfortable spot where I managed to get a glimpse of his genuine thirst for knowledge, unlocking invaluable insights in my mind. 

To this day, in his honor, everything that I learn, I treat myself with uttermost cynicism, because if I think I know, I'll be arrogant enough to stop learning. This project of two years taught me many things about semiconductors, but most importantly it taught me to be serious and sincere about what I learn and how I learn.

Through these academic and personal struggles, I created my own kinetic Monte Carlo simulation in C and MATLAB, designing, implementing, debugging and visualizing the code by myself. With Prof. Sano's help, I validated my simulation by extracting data and comparing transport behavior to already established simulations. Additionally, for the first time in this field, I managed to demonstrate Fermi-Dirac behavior in the organic semiconductor produced by an stochastic process.

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