Conjugated polymers with controllable interfacial order and energetics enable tunable heterojunctions in organic and colloidal quantum dot photovoltaics
Type
ArticleAuthors
Zhong, Yufei
Kirmani, Ahmad R.

Lan, Xinzheng
Carpenter, Joshua
Chew, Annabel Rong-Hui
Awartani, Omar

Yu, Liyang

Niazi, Muhammad Rizwan

Voznyy, Oleksandr

Hu, Hanlin

Ngongang Ndjawa, Guy Olivier

Tietze, Max Lutz
Salleo, Alberto
Ade, Harald
Sargent, Edward H.
Amassian, Aram

KAUST Department
KAUST Solar Center (KSC)Material Science and Engineering Program
Physical Science and Engineering (PSE) Division
Office of the VP
Date
2021-12-24Embargo End Date
2022-12-24Submitted Date
2021-11-06Permanent link to this record
http://hdl.handle.net/10754/674942
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Conjugated polymers are widely used as photoactive and transport layers in organic and hybrid photovoltaics (PV), where the energetics of polymers are a key design criterion. Here, we show that significant variations in terminal molecular ordering between top and bottom surfaces of a wide range of conjugated polymer films can result in sizable interfacial ionization energy (IE) differences by as much as 0.33 eV, which has significant impact on organic and hybrid PV devices. Such tunability is surprisingly seen even in nominally amorphous polymers. We devise a strategy leveraging wet and dry laminations to form donor–acceptor planar heterojunction (PHJ) devices using exposed and buried surfaces of donor polymers and demonstrate meaningful influence over the open circuit voltage (V$_OC$) by up to 0.32 V. We use this insight to devise a controlled intermixing approach which yields superior V$_OC$ and J$_SC$ to conventional bulk heterojunction devices by leveraging the disordered interface to maximize V$_OC$ and the greater aggregation of the donor to increase the J$_SC$. We go on to demonstrate how judicious control of polymer surface IE benefits charge extraction in colloidal quantum dot PV devices in the role of hole transport layers. Our results show that polymer interfacial and bulk properties are both critical to the functionality of optoelectronic devices and should both be given prime consideration when designing heterojunction devices.Citation
Zhong, Y., Kirmani, A. R., Lan, X., Carpenter, J., Rong-Hui Chew, A., Awartani, O., … Amassian, A. (2022). Conjugated polymers with controllable interfacial order and energetics enable tunable heterojunctions in organic and colloidal quantum dot photovoltaics. Journal of Materials Chemistry A. doi:10.1039/d1ta09544gSponsors
Y. Zhong acknowledges funding supported by Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under grant no Y22E021579. H. Ade, J. Carpenter and O. Awartani acknowledge funding supported under ONR N000141512322 and N000141712204.Publisher
Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)Journal
JOURNAL OF MATERIALS CHEMISTRY AAdditional Links
http://xlink.rsc.org/?DOI=D1TA09544Gae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1039/d1ta09544g