Efficient Exciton Harvesting through Long-Range Energy Transfer

Abstract

Efficient exciton collection at charge-generation sites is one of the key requirements for the improvement in power conversion efficiency (PCE) of organic solar cells, because only excitons arriving at a donor/acceptor interface can be dissociated into free charge carriers. We evaluated the effective diffusion length in poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) by using donor/acceptor bilayers with two different exciton-quenching acceptors. One is an insoluble fullerene polymer (p-PCBVB), which is an efficient electron-accepting material with negligible absorption in the visible region. The other is a low-bandgap polymer, poly[(4, 4-bis(2-ethylhexyl)-dithieno[3, 2-b:2', 3'-d]silole)-2, 6-diyl-alt-(2, 1, 3-benzothiadiazole)-4, 7-diyl], (PSBTBT). This polymer has a large absorption band in the near-IR region, which overlaps well with the emission band of P3HT. The effective diffusion length of P3HT excitons is evaluated to be 15nm for P3HT/p-PCBVB bilayers and improved to 30nm for P3HT/PSBTBT bilayers. This improvement is ascribed to long-range energy transfer from P3HT to PSBTBT. This finding suggests that the effective diffusion length of P3HT excitons can be increased through long-range energy transfer by incorporating PSBTBT into P3HT/PCBM blends.