Deconvolution of time of flight photocurrent transients and electronic response time in columnar liquid crystals

The attempts to create thinner samples of columnar discotic liquid crystals in order to avoid stack defects and measure charge carrier motion on low d efect density stacks by the time of flight technique, inevitably leads to p roblems. The time of flight becomes faster while the electronic response ti me becomes slower as a result of the increasing sample capacitance. Eventua lly the time of flight transit time becomes indiscernible due to the system response distortion. This article demonstrates the recovery of the time of flight signal from such distorted data by analyzing the nature of the sign al and using this analysis to deconvolve a digitally acquired signal. (C) 2 000 American Institute of Physics. [S0021-8979(00)05514-6].