Organic amorphous semiconductor films are widely applied to xerographic applications and electroluminescence devices due to feasibility of preparing large-area and uniform thin films in low cost. Their electrical properties, in particular, the carrier transport properties, however, are far from ideal properties in their molecular crystals and limit their device applications as they are. Recently we have developed a new type of organic semiconductors with liquid crystallinity in which we expected fast carrier transport due to the self-organizing molecular alignment. In fact, 2-phenylnaphthalene derivatives, which are a representative material of this type, exhibit the superior carrier transport properties characterized by a fast ambipolar carrier mobility of 10
-4-10
-2 cm
2/Vs independent of temperature and electric field. In this paper, we survey its carrier transport properties on the basis of our experimental results and discuss them in comparison with those in the amorphous semiconductors to demonstrate its high potential as a new type of opto-electronic imaging materials in the future. In addition, new properties originated from anisotropic molecular alignment and their application to polarized light emitting diodes are also demonstrated.
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