Ground State Bleaching at Donor–Acceptor Interfaces

Abstract

Charge separation at the donor–acceptor interface is a key step for high efficiency in organic solar cells. If interfacial hybrid states exist already in the dark it is plausible that they can have a major impact on the dissociation of optically generated excitations. In this work we probe such interfacial states via steady state absorption spectroscopy. A substantial bleaching of the absorption spectrum is found near the absorption edge when an electron‐accepting layer of either trinitrofluorenone (TNF), C60, or a perylene‐diimide derivative is deposited on top of a layer of electron‐donating conjugated polymers, such as MEH‐PPV or various poly‐phenylene. This is in part attributed to the formation of ground state complexes with low oscillator strength. The experiments bear out a correlation between the reduction of the absorbance with the energy gap between the donor‐HOMO and acceptor‐LUMO, the effective conjugation length of the donor, and the efficiency of exciton dissociation in the solar cell. The effect originates from mixing of the donor‐HOMO and the acceptor LUMO. Calculations using density functional theory support this reasoning. Implications for efficiency of organic solar cells will be discussed.