ABSTRACT
A strategy for increasing the conversion efficiency of organic photovoltaics has been to increase the VOC by tuning the energy levels of donor and acceptor components. However, this opens up a new loss pathway from an interfacial charge transfer state to a triplet exciton (TE) state called electron back transfer (EBT), which is detrimental to device performance. To test this hypothesis, we study triplet formation in the high performing PTB7:PC71BM blend system and determine the impact of the morphology-optimizing additive 1,8-diiodoctane (DIO). Using photoluminescence and spin-sensitive optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) measurements at low temperature, we find that TEs form on PC71BM via intersystem crossing from singlet excitons and on PTB7 via EBT mechanism. For DIO blends with smaller fullerene domains, an increased density of PTB7 TEs is observed. The EBT process is found to be significant only at very low temperature. At 300 K, no triplets are detected via ODMR, and electrically detected magnetic resonance on optimized solar cells indicates that TEs are only present on the fullerenes. We conclude that in PTB7:PC71BM devices, TE formation via EBT is impacted by fullerene domain size at low temperature, but at room temperature, EBT does not represent a dominant loss pathway.
ABSTRACT
Thermally stimulated current (TSC) measurements are used to characterize electronic trap states in methylammonium lead iodide perovsite solar cells. Several TSC peaks were observed over the temperature range from 20 K to room temperature. To elucidate the origins of these peaks, devices with various organic charge transport layers and devices without transport layers were tested. Two peaks appear at very low temperatures, indicating shallow trap states that are mainly attributed to the PCBM/C60 electron transport bilayer. However, two additional peaks appear at higher temperatures, that is, they are deeper in energy, and are assigned to the perovskite layer. At around T = 163 K, a sharp peak, also present in the dark TSC measurements, is assigned to the orthorhombic-tetragonal phase transition in the perovskite. However, a peak at around T = 191 K is assigned to trap states with activation energies of around 500 meV but with a rather low concentration of 1 × 10(21) m(-3).
