Developing organic photovoltaic materials systems requires a detailed understanding of the heterojunction interface, as it is the foundation for photovoltaic device performance. The bilayer fullerene/acene system is one of the most studied models for testing our understanding of this interface. We demonstrate that the fullerene and acene molecules chemically react at the heterojunction interface, creating a partial monolayer of a Diels-Alder cycloadduct species. Furthermore, we show that the reaction occurs during standard deposition conditions and that thermal annealing increases the concentration of the cycloadduct. The cycloaddition reaction reduces the number of sites available at the interface for charge transfer exciton recombination and decreases the charge transfer state reorganization energy, increasing the open circuit voltage. The submonolayer quantity of the cycloadduct renders it difficult to identify with conventional characterization techniques; we use atom probe tomography to overcome this limitation while also measuring the spatial distribution of each chemical species.

In this paper, we demonstrate how to apply atom probe tomography (APT) to molecular organic electronic materials. We demonstrate that APT can provide an unprecedented combination of mass resolution of < 1 Da, spatial resolution of ∼ 0.3 nm in z and ∼ 1 nm in x-y, and an analytic sensitivity of ∼ 50 ppm. We detail two systems that demonstrate the power of APT to uncover structure-property relationships in organic systems that have proven extremely difficult to probe using existing techniques: (1) a model organic photovoltaic system in which we show a chemical reaction occurs at the heterointerface; and (2) a model organic lightemitting diode system in which we show molecular segregation occurs. These examples illustrate the power of APT to enable new insights into organic molecular materials.

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Triplet–triplet annihilation (TTA) is one of the primary contributors to efficiency roll-off and permanent material degradation in phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes. The two limiting case models typically used to quantify this quenching mechanism are multi-step Dexter and single-step Förster, which, respectively, assume ideal Fickian diffusion or perfect trapping of triplet excitons. For device-relevant guest doping levels (typically 5–12 vol. %), both significant diffusion of excitons and trapping due to spatial and energetic disorder exist, so neither conventional model fits experimental data well. We develop and validate an intermediate TTA model, which is a weighted average of the limiting cases of pure radiative decay (no TTA) and multi-step Dexter based TTA that returns an effective TTA rate constant and a parameter quantifying the portion of well-isolated excitons. Kinetic Monte-Carlo simulations and time-resolved photoluminescence measurements of an archetype host–guest system demonstrate that our intermediate model provides significantly improved fits with more realistic physical values, is more robust to variations in experimental conditions, and provides an analysis framework for the effects of trapping on TTA.

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