A Polycrystalline Polymer Donor as Pre‐Aggregate toward Ordered Molecular Aggregation for 19.3% Efficiency Binary Organic Solar Cells

Abstract

AbstractOrganic semiconductors are generally featured with low structure order in solid‐state films, which leads to low charge‐transport mobility and strong charge recombination in their photovoltaic devices. In this work, a “polycrystal‐induced aggregation” strategy orders the polymer donor (PM6) and non‐fullerene acceptor (L8‐BO) molecules during solution casting with the assistance of PM6 polycrystals that are incubated through a vapor diffusion method, toward improved solar cell efficiency with either thin or thick photoactive layers. These PM6 polycrystals are redissolved in chloroform to prepare PM6 pre‐aggregates (PM6‐PA), and further incorporated into the conventional PM6:L8‐BO blend solutions, which is found to prolong the molecular organization process and enhance the aggregation of both the PM6 and the L8‐BO components. As the results, with the assistance of 10% PM6‐PA, PM6:L8‐BO solar cell devices obtain power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) from 18.0% and 16.2% to 19.3% and 17.2% with a 100 nm‐thick and 300 nm‐thick photoactive layer, respectively.