Thermal annealing is an effective process for regulating the arrangement of liquid crystalline molecules to realize high performance devices. Although, extensive research has been conducted on the development of this technique in recent years, it is still challenging to fine-control the molecular packing and arrangement in thin films. Herein, we propose an inverted annealing approach to address this issue, which successfully improves the performance of organic thin film transistors based on 2-(4-dodecylphenyl) (Bucella et al., 2015) [1]benzothieno[3,2-b]benzothiophene (C12-Ph-BTBT) with ~25% increase in mobility compared to the counterparts with conventional annealing. In addition, the photoelectric properties of C12-Ph-BTBT based phototransistors treated with inverted annealing display a similar improvement, with an enhancement in the highest photoresponsivity from 461.6 A/W for conventionlly annealed devices to 541.7 A/W under the incident beam intensity of 179.2 μW/cm². This device improvement is mainly ascribed to the gravity induced alignment of C12-Ph-BTBT molecules due to their soft nature at high temperature. Our results provide an effective way to improve the performance of organic electronic devices based on liquid crystalline molecules.

热退火是调节液晶分子的排列以实现高性能器件的有效方法。尽管近年来已经对该技术的发展进行了广泛的研究，但是精细控制薄膜中的分子堆积和排列仍然是挑战。本文中，我们提出了一种反向退火方法来解决此问题，该方法成功地改善了基于2-（4-十二烷基苯基）的有机薄膜晶体管的性能（Bucella et al。，2015）[1] benzothieno [3,2-b与传统退火方法相比，]苯并噻吩（C12-Ph-BTBT）的迁移率提高了约25％。此外，经反向退火处理的基于C12-Ph-BTBT的光电晶体管的光电性能显示出相似的改进， μW / cm ²。这种装置的改进主要归因于C12-Ph-BTBT分子由于在高温下的柔软特性而受到重力诱导的排列。我们的结果提供了一种有效的方法来改善基于液晶分子的有机电子设备的性能。