Morphology, Temperature, and Field Dependence of Charge Separation in High-Efficiency Solar Cells Based on Alternating Polyquinoxaline Copolymer


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Authors
Bakulin, AA 
Xia, Y 
Bakker, HJ 
Inganäs, O 
Gao, F 
Abstract

Charge separation and recombination are key processes determining the performance of organic optoelectronic devices. Here we combine photoluminescence and photovoltaic characterisation of organic solar cell devices with ultrafast multi-pulse photocurrent spectroscopy to investigate charge generation mechanisms in the organic photovoltaic devices based on a blend of an alternating polyquinoxaline copolymer with fullerene. The combined use of these techniques enables the determination of the contributions of geminate and bimolecular processes to the solar cell performance. We observe that charge separation is not a temperature-activated process in the studied materials. At the same time, the generation of free charges shows a clear external-field and morphology dependence. This indicates that the critical step of charge separation involves the non-equilibrium state that is formed at early times after photoexcitation, when the polaronic localisation is not yet complete. This work reveals new aspects of molecular level charge dynamics in the organic light-conversion systems.

Description
Keywords
40 Engineering, 3403 Macromolecular and Materials Chemistry, 4016 Materials Engineering, 34 Chemical Sciences
Journal Title
Journal of Physical Chemistry C
Conference Name
Journal ISSN
1932-7447
1932-7455
Volume Title
120
Publisher
American Chemical Society (ACS)
Sponsorship
We thank Maxim Pschenichnikov for useful discussions, and Ergang Wang for providing TQ1. This work was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) through the “Stichting voor Fundamenteel Onderzoek der Materie” (FOM). A.A.B. also acknowledges a VENI grant from NWO. A.A.B. is currently a Royal Society University Research Fellow. Photovoltaics research at Linköping was supported by the Swedish Research Council (VR), the European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions, the Swedish Energy Agency, and the Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation (KAW).