Enabling low voltage losses and high photocurrent in fullerene-free organic photovoltaics

Jun Yuan; Tianyi Huang; Pei Cheng; Yingping Zou; Huotian Zhang; Jonathan Lee Yang; Sheng-Yung Chang; Zhenzhen Zhang; Wenchao Huang; Rui Wang; Dong Meng; Feng Gao; Yang Yang

doi:10.1038/s41467-019-08386-9

Enabling low voltage losses and high photocurrent in fullerene-free organic photovoltaics

Nat Commun. 2019 Feb 4;10(1):570. doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-08386-9.

Authors

Jun Yuan^{1

2

3}, Tianyi Huang¹, Pei Cheng¹, Yingping Zou⁴, Huotian Zhang⁵, Jonathan Lee Yang⁶, Sheng-Yung Chang¹, Zhenzhen Zhang², Wenchao Huang¹, Rui Wang¹, Dong Meng^{1

3}, Feng Gao⁷, Yang Yang^{8

9}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA.
² College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Central South University, 410083, Changsha, China.
³ California NanoSystems Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA.
⁴ College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Central South University, 410083, Changsha, China. yingpingzou@csu.edu.cn.
⁵ Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM), Linköping University, 581 83, Linköping, Sweden.
⁶ College of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
⁷ Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology (IFM), Linköping University, 581 83, Linköping, Sweden. feng.gao@liu.se.
⁸ Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA. yangy@ucla.edu.
⁹ California NanoSystems Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA. yangy@ucla.edu.

Abstract

Despite significant development recently, improving the power conversion efficiency of organic photovoltaics (OPVs) is still an ongoing challenge to overcome. One of the prerequisites to achieving this goal is to enable efficient charge separation and small voltage losses at the same time. In this work, a facile synthetic strategy is reported, where optoelectronic properties are delicately tuned by the introduction of electron-deficient-core-based fused structure into non-fullerene acceptors. Both devices exhibited a low voltage loss of 0.57 V and high short-circuit current density of 22.0 mA cm^-2, resulting in high power conversion efficiencies of over 13.4%. These unconventional electron-deficient-core-based non-fullerene acceptors with near-infrared absorption lead to low non-radiative recombination losses in the resulting organic photovoltaics, contributing to a certified high power conversion efficiency of 12.6%.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't