Voltage Losses in Organic Solar Cells: Understanding the Contributions of Intramolecular Vibrations to Nonradiative Recombinations

Xiankai Chen, Jean-Luc Bredas

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

59 Scopus citations

Abstract

The large voltage losses usually encountered in organic solar cells significantly limit the power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of these devices, with the result that the current highest PCE values in single-junction organic photovoltaic remain smaller than for other solar cell technologies, such as crystalline silicon or perovskite solar cells. In particular, the nonradiative recombinations to the electronic ground state from the lowest-energy charge-transfer (CT) states at the donor-acceptor interfaces in the active layer of organic devices, are responsible for a significant part of the voltage losses. Here, to better comprehend the nonradiative voltage loss mechanisms, a fully quantum-mechanical rate formula is employed within the framework of time-dependent perturbation theory, combined with density functional theory. The objective is to uncover the specific contributions of intramolecular vibrations to the CT-state nonradiative recombinations in several model systems, which include small-molecule and polymer donors as well as fullerene and nonfullerene acceptors.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1702227
JournalAdvanced Energy Materials
Volume8
Issue number9
DOIs
StatePublished - Dec 18 2017

Bibliographical note

KAUST Repository Item: Exported on 2020-10-01
Acknowledgements: The authors acknowledge the financial support from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and, at the Georgia Institute of Technology, from the Office of Naval Research (Award No. N00014-17-1-2208). The authors are grateful to the KAUST IT Research Computing Team and Supercomputing Laboratory for providing continuous assistance as well as computational and storage resources.

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