A Facile Synthesized Polymer Featuring B-N Covalent Bond and Small Singlet-Triplet Gap for High-Performance Organic Solar Cells

High-efficiency organic solar cells (OSCs) largely rely on polymer donors. Herein, we report a new building block BNT and a relevant polymer PBNT-BDD featuring B-N covalent bond for application in OSCs. The BNT unit is synthesized in only 3 steps, leading to the facile synthesis of PBNT-BDD. When blended with a nonfullerene acceptor Y6-BO, PBNT-BDD afforded a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 16.1 % in an OSC, comparable to the benzo[1,2-b:4,5-b ']dithiophene (BDT)-based counterpart. The nonradiative recombination energy loss of 0.19 eV was afforded by PBNT-BDD. PBNT-BDD also exhibited weak crystallinity and appropriate miscibility with Y6-BO, benefitting of morphological stability. The singlet-triplet gap (Delta E-ST) of PBNT-BDD is as low as 0.15 eV, which is much lower than those of common organic semiconductors (>= 0.6 eV). As a result, the triplet state of PBNT-BDD is higher than the charge transfer (CT) state, which would suppress the recombination via triplet state effectively.

Automated summary

The new organic solar cell material PBNT-BDD, featuring B-N covalent bond, is synthesized easily and shows high efficiency when blended with a nonfullerene acceptor, with a low nonradiative recombination energy loss of 0.19 eV.