Charge Carrier Scattering in Polymers: A New Neutral Coupled Soliton Channel

Abstract

The dynamical scattering of two oppositely charged bipolarons in non-degenerate organic semiconducting lattices is numerically investigated in the framework of a one-dimensional tight-biding-Hubbard model that includes lattice relaxation. Our findings show that it is possible for the bipolaron pair to merge into a state composed of a confined soliton-antisoliton pair, which is characterized by the appearance of states within less than 0.1 eV from the Fermi level. This compound is in a narrow analogy to a meson confining a quark-antiquark pair. Interestingly, solitons are quasi-particles theoretically predicted to arise only in polymer lattices with degenerate ground state: in the general case of non-degenerate ground state polymers, isolated solitons are not allowed.