With the demonstration of small-area, single-junction polymer solar cells (PSCs) with power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) over the 10% performance milestone, the manufacturing of high-performance large-area PSC modules is becoming the most critical issue for commercial applications. However, materials and processes that are optimized for fabricating small-area devices may not be applicable for the production of high-performance large-area PSC modules. One of the challenges is to develop new conductive interfacial materials that can be easily processed with a wide range of thicknesses without significantly affecting the performance of the PSCs. Toward this goal, we report two novel naphthalene diimide-based, self-doped, n-type water/alcohol-soluble conjugated polymers (WSCPs) that can be processed with a broad thickness range of 5 to 100 nm as efficient electron transporting layers (ETLs) for high-performance PSCs. Space charge limited current and electron spin resonance spectroscopy studies confirm that the presence of amine or ammonium bromide groups on the side chains of the WSCP can n-dope PC71BM at the bulk heterojunction (BHJ)/ETL interface, which improves the electron extraction properties at the cathode. In addition, both amino functional groups can induce self-doping to the WSCPs, although by different doping mechanisms, which leads to highly conductive ETLs with reduced ohmic loss for electron transport and extraction. Ultimately, PSCs based on the self-doped WSCP ETLs exhibit significantly improved device performance, yielding PCEs as high as 9.7% and 10.11% for PTB7-Th/PC71BM and PffBT4T-2OD/PC71BM systems, respectively. More importantly, with PffBT4T-2OD/PC71BM BHJ as an active layer, a prominent PCE of over 8% was achieved even when a thick ETL of 100 nm was used. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest efficiency demonstrated for PSCs with a thick interlayer and light-harvesting layer, which are important criteria for eventually making organic photovoltaic modules based on roll-to-roll coating processes.

We report the application of a perylene bisimide (PBI-H) as zinc oxide (ZnO) surface modifier to afford an organic-inorganic co-interlayer for highly efficient inverted organic photovoltaics (i-OPV). By thermal annealing, a N-Zn chemical bond formed between PBI-H and ZnO, inducing close organic-inorganic combination. In addition, this co-interlayer shows decreased work function and increased electron transportation and conductivity, which are benefits for the cathode to enhance charge extraction efficiency and decrease recombination losses. As a result a highly efficient i-OPV was achieved with a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 9.43% based on this co-interlayer with PTB7:PC71BM as the active layer, which shows over 35% enhancement compared to that of the device without the PBI-H layer. Moreover, this co-interlayer was widely applicable for i-OPVs based on various material systems, such as P3HT:PC61BM and PTB7-Th:PC71BM, resulting in PCE as high as 4.78% and 10.31%, respectively.

Visible-near infrared photodetectors are reported with excellent overall device parameters from conjugated polymers with different optical bandgaps by optimal design in device structure and optimizing the thickness of the photoactive layer in nanoscale. The best visible-near infrared photodetectors show high detectivity (D*) of 1.7 × 10(13) Jones at a wavelength of 710 nm, which is among one of the best results of polymer photodetectors reported to date.

Herein is described a blue-emitting gold(III)-TADF complex Au-1 that could act as a sensitizer for a solution-processed organic light-emitting diode (SP-OLED), in which a multi-resonance TADF emitter ν-DABNA is employed...