Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 11, Issue 1, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18439-z
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Funding
- German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through the Innoprofile project 'Organische p-i-n Bauelemente2.2' [FKZ 03IPT602X]
- UKRI Global Challenge Research Fund project SUNRISE [EP/P032591/1]
- Imperial College London
- Global Research Laboratory Program of the National Research Foundation (NRF) - Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning [NRF-2017K1A1A2 013153]
- European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme [639750, 864625]
- European Union [722651]
- Fonds de la Recherche Scientifiques de Belgique (F.R.S.-FNRS) [2.5020.11]
- Tier-1 supercomputer of the Federation Wallonie-Bruxelles - Walloon Region [1117545]
- EPSRC [EP/P032591/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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Organic solar cells usually utilise a heterojunction between electron-donating (D) and electron-accepting (A) materials to split excitons into charges. However, the use of D-A blends intrinsically limits the photovoltage and introduces morphological instability. Here, we demonstrate that polycrystalline films of chemically identical molecules offer a promising alternative and show that photoexcitation of alpha-sexithiophene (alpha-6T) films results in efficient charge generation. This leads to alpha-6T based homojunction organic solar cells with an external quantum efficiency reaching up to 44% and an open-circuit voltage of 1.61 V. Morphological, photoemission, and modelling studies show that boundaries between alpha-6T crystalline domains with different orientations generate an electrostatic landscape with an interfacial energy offset of 0.4 eV, which promotes the formation of hybridised exciton/charge-transfer states at the interface, dissociating efficiently into free charges. Our findings open new avenues for organic solar cell design where material energetics are tuned through molecular electrostatic engineering and mesoscale structural control.
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