Polarization Energies at Organic–Organic Interfaces: Impact on the Charge Separation Barrier at Donor–Acceptor Interfaces in Organic Solar Cells
Type
ArticleKAUST Department
KAUST Solar Center (KSC)Laboratory for Computational and Theoretical Chemistry of Advanced Materials
Material Science and Engineering Program
Physical Science and Engineering (PSE) Division
KAUST Grant Number
N62909-15-1-2003Date
2016-06-08Online Publication Date
2016-06-08Print Publication Date
2016-06-22Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/611771
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
We probe the energetic landscape at a model pentacene/fullerene-C60 interface to investigate the interactions between positive and negative charges, which are critical to the processes of charge separation and recombination in organic solar cells. Using a polarizable force field, we find that polarization energy, i.e. the stabilization a charge feels due to its environment, is larger at the interface than in the bulk for both a positive and a negative charge. The combination of the charge being more stabilized at the interface and the Coulomb attraction between the charges, results in a barrier to charge separation at the pentacene-C60 interface that can be in excess of 0.7 eV for static configurations of the donor and acceptor locations. However, the impact of molecular motions, i.e., the dynamics, at the interface at room temperature results in a distribution of polarization energies and in charge separation barriers that can be significantly reduced. The dynamic nature of the interface is thus critical, with the polarization energy distributions indicating that sites along the interface shift in time between favorable and unfavorable configurations for charge separation.Citation
Polarization Energies at Organic–Organic Interfaces: Impact on the Charge Separation Barrier at Donor–Acceptor Interfaces in Organic Solar Cells 2016 ACS Applied Materials & InterfacesSponsors
This work has been supported by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), the KAUST Competitive Research Grant program, and the Office of Naval Research Global (Award N62909-15-1-2003). We acknowledge the IT Research Computing Team and Supercomputing Laboratory at KAUST for providing computational and storage resources. This work has also used the computing resources of the Garnet, Spirit, and Copper supercomputing systems through the DoD HPCMP. C.R. thanks the University of Kentucky Vice President of Research for start-up funds. We wish to thank Mahesh Kumar Ravva and Naga Rajesh Tummala for stimulating discussions and assistance with technical elements of the molecular dynamics simulations.Publisher
American Chemical Society (ACS)PubMed ID
27244215Additional Links
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsami.6b02851ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1021/acsami.6b02851
Scopus Count
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