In
an endeavor to examine how optical excitation of C60 and
PCBM contribute to the photogeneration of charge carriers in
organic solar cells, we investigated stationary photogeneration in
single-layer C60 and PCBM films over a broad spectrum as
a function of the electric field. We find that intrinsic photogeneration
starts at a photon energy of about 2.25 eV, i.e., about 0.4 eV above
the first singlet excited state. It originates from charge transfer
type states that can autoionize before relaxing to the lower-energy
singlet S1 state, in the spirit of Onsager’s 1938
theory. We analyze the internal quantum efficiency as a function of
electric field and photon energy to determine (1) the Coulombic binding
and separation of the electron–hole pairs, (2) the value of
the electrical gap, and (3) which fraction of photoexcitations can
fully separate at a given photon energy. The latter depends on the
coupling between the photogenerated charge transfer states and the
eventual charge transporting states. It is by a factor of 3 lower
in PCBM. Close to the threshold energy for intrinsic photoconduction
(2.25 eV), the generating entity is a photogenerated electron–hole
pair with roughly 2 nm separation. At higher photon energy, more expanded
pairs are produced incoherently via thermalization.