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Title: Band-like Charge Photogeneration at a Crystalline Organic Donor/Acceptor Interface

Journal Article · · Advanced Energy Materials
 [1];  [1];  [2];  [3];  [1];  [4];  [1];  [5];  [2];  [1]; ORCiD logo [5]
  1. Princeton Univ., NJ (United States). Dept. of Electrical Engineering
  2. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States). Dept. of Chemistry
  3. Princeton Univ., NJ (United States). Dept. of Chemical and Biological Engineering
  4. Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States). Dept. of Chemistry; Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States). Center for Nanoscale Materials
  5. Princeton Univ., NJ (United States). Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment

Organic photovoltaic cells possess desirable practical characteristics, such as the potential for low-cost fabrication on flexible substrates, but they lag behind their inorganic counterparts in performance due in part to fundamental energy loss mechanisms, such as overcoming the charge transfer (CT) state binding energy when photogenerated charge is transferred across the donor/acceptor interface. However, recent work has suggested that crystalline interfaces can reduce this binding energy due to enhanced CT state delocalization. Solar cells based on rubrene and C60 are investigated as an archetypal system because it allows the degree of crystallinity to be moldulated from a highly disordered to highly ordered system. Using a postdeposition annealing method to transform as-deposited amorphous rubrene thin films into ones that are highly crystalline, it is shown that the CT state of a highly crystalline rubrene/C60 heterojunction undergoes extreme delocalization parallel to the interface leading to a band-like state that exhibits a linear Stark effect. This state parallels the direct charge formation of inorganic solar cells and reduces energetic losses by 220 meV compared with 12 other archetypal heterojunctions reported in the literature.

Research Organization:
Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC) (United States). Center for Excitonics (CE); Princeton Univ., NJ (United States); Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES) (SC-22). Materials Sciences & Engineering Division; Department of Defense (DoD); National Science Foundation (NSF); USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES). Scientific User Facilities Division
Grant/Contract Number:
SC0001088; SC0012458; SC0012365; DMR‐1332208; DMR‐1420541; AC02‐06CH11357
OSTI ID:
1470430
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1412584; OSTI ID: 1595406
Journal Information:
Advanced Energy Materials, Vol. 8, Issue 9; Related Information: CE partners with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (lead); Brookhaven National Laboratory; Harvard University; ISSN 1614-6832
Publisher:
WileyCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 18 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (4)

Charge-transfer electronic states in organic solar cells journal September 2019
Thousand-atom ab initio calculations of excited states at organic/organic interfaces: toward first-principles investigations of charge photogeneration journal January 2018
Molecular origin of efficient hole transfer from non-fullerene acceptors: insights from first-principles calculations journal January 2019
Variable charge transfer state energies at nanostructured pentacene/C 60 interfaces journal May 2018