Nanostructure of organic semiconductor thin films: Molecular dynamics modeling with solvent evaporation

Abstract

We present a procedure for simulating solution deposition of organic thin-films on explicitly modeled substrates via solvent evaporation simulations in a molecular dynamics framework. Additionally, we have developed force fields for the family of IDTBR nonfullerene acceptors, which have been widely employed in the literature as $n$-type materials in several types of organic semiconductor devices, and we analyzed their structure-property relationships using a combination of grazing incidence x-ray scattering measurements, atomistic molecular dynamics simulations, and quantum chemical calculations. We find that thermal fluctuations can have a significant impact on calculated electron transfer integrals, and that the $\ensuremath{\pi}$-stacking interactions of the electron withdrawing benzothiadiazole building blocks are key to high electron coupling in amorphous thin films of $n$-type materials.