Fullerene derivatives as electron donor for organic photovoltaic cells

Abstract

We demonstrated the performance of unconventional, all-fullerene-based, planar heterojunction (PHJ) organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells using fullerene derivatives indene-C60 bisadduct (ICBA) and phenyl C61-butyric acid methyl ester as the electron donors with fullerene C70 as the electron acceptor. Two different charge generation processes, including charge generation in the fullerene bulk and exciton dissociation at the donor-acceptor interface, have been found to exist in such all-fullerene-based PHJ cells and the contribution to the total photocurrent from each process is strongly dependent on the thickness of fullerene donor. The optimized 5 nm ICBA/40 nm C70 PHJ cell gives clear external quantum efficiency responses for the long-wavelength photons corresponding to the dissociation of strongly bound Frenkel excitons, which is hardly observed in fullerene-based single layer reference devices. This approach using fullerene as a donor material provides further possibilities for developing high performance OPV cells.