Charge-Transfer States at Organic-Organic Interfaces: Impact of Static and Dynamic Disorders

Molecular dynamics simulations are combined with density functional theory calculations to evaluate the impact of static and dynamic disorders on the energy distribution of charge-transfer (CT) states at donor-acceptor heterojunctions, such as those found in the active layers of organic solar cells. It is shown that each of these two disorder components can be partitioned into contributions related to the energetic disorder of the transport states and to the disorder associated with the hole-electron electrostatic interaction energies. The methodology is applied to evaluate the energy distributions of the CT states in representative bulk heterojunctions based on poly-3-hexyl-thiophene and phenyl-C-61-butyric-acid methyl ester. The results indicate that the torsional fluctuations of the polymer backbones are the main source of both static and dynamic disorders for the CT states as well as for the transport levels. The impact of static and dynamic disorders on radiative and nonradiative geminate recombination processes is also discussed.