Traps and transport resistance are the next frontiers for stable non-fullerene acceptor solar cells.

Wöpke, Christopher; Göhler, Clemens; Saladina, Maria; Du, Xiaoyan; Nian, Li; Greve, Christopher; Zhu, Chenhui; Yallum, Kaila M; Hofstetter, Yvonne J; Becker-Koch, David; Li, Ning; Heumüller, Thomas; Milekhin, Ilya; Zahn, Dietrich R T; Brabec, Christoph J; Banerji, Natalie; Vaynzof, Yana; Herzig, Eva M; MacKenzie, Roderick C I and Deibel, Carsten (2022). Traps and transport resistance are the next frontiers for stable non-fullerene acceptor solar cells. Nature communications, 13(1), p. 3786. Nature Publishing Group 10.1038/s41467-022-31326-z

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Stability is one of the most important challenges facing material research for organic solar cells (OSC) on their path to further commercialization. In the high-performance material system PM6:Y6 studied here, we investigate degradation mechanisms of inverted photovoltaic devices. We have identified two distinct degradation pathways: one requires the presence of both illumination and oxygen and features a short-circuit current reduction, the other one is induced thermally and marked by severe losses of open-circuit voltage and fill factor. We focus our investigation on the thermally accelerated degradation. Our findings show that bulk material properties and interfaces remain remarkably stable, however, aging-induced defect state formation in the active layer remains the primary cause of thermal degradation. The increased trap density leads to higher non-radiative recombination, which limits the open-circuit voltage and lowers the charge carrier mobility in the photoactive layer. Furthermore, we find the trap-induced transport resistance to be the major reason for the drop in fill factor. Our results suggest that device lifetimes could be significantly increased by marginally suppressing trap formation, leading to a bright future for OSC.

Item Type:

Journal Article (Original Article)

Division/Institute:

08 Faculty of Science > Department of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Pharmaceutical Sciences (DCBP)

UniBE Contributor:

Yallum, Kaila Morgan, Banerji, Natalie

Subjects:

500 Science > 570 Life sciences; biology
500 Science > 540 Chemistry

ISSN:

2041-1723

Publisher:

Nature Publishing Group

Language:

English

Submitter:

Pubmed Import

Date Deposited:

04 Jul 2022 10:19

Last Modified:

27 Jan 2023 17:20

Publisher DOI:

10.1038/s41467-022-31326-z

Related URLs:

PubMed ID:

35778394

BORIS DOI:

10.48350/171061

URI:

https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/171061

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