Polymer solar cells have been shown to degrade under X‐rays. Here, in situ polymer photovoltaic performance and recombination lifetimes are measured and it is found that charge accumulation is the primary reason for degradation of solar cells. This is affected by the mixing ratio of donor and acceptor in the bulk heterojunction. Both a quantitative understanding and the physical model of the degradation mechanism are presented. Understanding of the degradation mechanism is extended in polymer donor–acceptor bulk heterojunction systems to propose a material combination for making radiation hard diodes that can find important application in fields ranging from memory arrays to organic X‐ray detectors for medical imaging.

Polymer solar cells have been characterized during and after x-ray irradiation. The open circuit voltage, dark current and power conversion efficiency show degradation consistent with the generation of defect states in the polymer semiconductor. The polymer solar cell device remained functional with exposure to a considerable dose (500 krad (SiO(2))) and showed clear signs of recovery upon removal of the irradiation source (degraded from 4.1% to 2.2% and recovered to 2.9%). Mobility-relaxation time variation, derived from J-V measurement, clearly demonstrates that radiation induced defect generation mechanisms in the organic semiconductor are active and need to be further studied. Optical transmission results ruled out the possibility of reduced light absorption and/or polymer crystallinity. The results suggest that organic solar cells are sufficiently radiation tolerant to be useful for space applications.

In this work, we have studied Joule heating in carbon nanotube based very large scale integration (VLSI) interconnects and incorporated Joule heating influenced scattering in our previously developed current transport model. The theoretical model explains breakdown in carbon nanotube resistance which limits the current density. We have also studied scattering parameters of carbon nanotube (CNT) interconnects and compared with the earlier work. For 1 µm length single-wall carbon nanotube, 3 dB frequency in S12 parameter reduces to ~120 GHz from 1 THz considering Joule heating. It has been found that bias voltage has little effect on scattering parameters, while length has very strong effect on scattering parameters.

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