Proceedings of 13th Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV21)
Publication date: 11th May 2021
Organic solar cells (OSCs) typically employ electron donor and acceptor materials to faciliate efficient charge generation from excitons. Minimizing the energy offset between the lowest exciton and charge-transfer (CT) states is a widely employed strategy to suppress the energy loss (Eg/q – VOC) in polymer:non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) OSCs. While a lot of studies have investigated the CT state energetics and its correlation with device photovoltage as well as voltage losses, the CT state dynamics still remains relatively unexplored. In my talk, I will discuss how transient absorption spectroscopy (TAS) is employed to determine CT state lifetimes in a series of low energy loss polymer:NFA blends. TAS measurements show that the CT state lifetime follows an inverse energy gap law dependence and decreases as the energy loss is reduced. This behavior is assigned to increased mixing between these CT states and shorter-lived singlet excitons of the lower gap component as the energy offset is reduced. These results highlight how achieving longer exciton and CT state lifetimes has the potential for further enhancement of OSC efficiencies.