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Understanding energetic disorder in electron-deficient-core-based non-fullerene solar cells

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Abstract

Recent advances in material design for organic solar cells (OSCs) are primarily focused on developing near-infrared non-fullerene acceptors, typically A-DA′D-A type acceptors (where A abbreviates an electron-withdrawing moiety and D, an electron-donor moiety), to achieve high external quantum efficiency while maintaining low voltage loss. However, the charge transport is still constrained by unfavorable molecular conformations, resulting in high energetic disorder and limiting the device performance. Here, a facile design strategy is reported by introducing the “wing” (alkyl chains) at the terminal of the DA′D central core of the A-DA′D-A type acceptor to achieve a favorable and ordered molecular orientation and therefore facilitate charge carrier transport. Benefitting from the reduced disorder, the electron mobilities could be significantly enhanced for the “wing”-containing molecules. By carefully changing the length of alkyl chains, the mobility of acceptor has been tuned to match with that of donor, leading to a minimized charge imbalance factor and a high fill factor (FF). We further provide useful design strategies for highly efficient OSCs with high FF.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key Research & Development Projects of China (2017YFA0206600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (21875286), Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of Hunan Province (2017JJ1029), Innovation-Driven Project of Central South University (2020CX001), and the Research Committee of HKBU (RC-ICRS/15-16/4A-SSK, FRG/16-17/077).

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  1. These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, China

    Jun Yuan, Honggang Chen, Can Zhu, Fangfang Cai, Qingya Wei, Wei Liu, Ye Liu, Weifang Liu, Hongjian Peng & Yingping Zou

  2. Department of Physics and Institute of Advanced Materials, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, China

    Chujun Zhang, Sin Hang Cheung, Hang Yin & Shukong So

  3. Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    Honggang Chen, Can Zhu, Beibei Qiu, Lei Meng & Yongfang Li

  4. Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM), Linköping University, Linköping, 58183, Sweden

    Rui Zhang, Huotian Zhang & Feng Gao

  5. State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun, 130022, China

    Jidong Zhang

  6. Hunan Key Laboratory for Super-microstructure and Ultrafast, Process School of Physics and Electronic, Changsha, 410083, China

    Junliang Yang

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  1. Jun Yuan
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Correspondence to Yingping Zou.

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Yuan, J., Zhang, C., Chen, H. et al. Understanding energetic disorder in electron-deficient-core-based non-fullerene solar cells. Sci. China Chem. 63, 1159–1168 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-020-9747-9

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