Improved charge transfer, mobility and morphology for high performance panchromatic organic photodetectors by adding PC71BM in P3HT:IEICO-4F

Abstract High performance of panchromatic organic photodetectors (OPDs) with a wide spectral response ranged from 300 to 1000 nm were realized through adding [6,6]-phenyl-C71-butyric acid methylester (PC71BM) fullerene as an electron acceptor into the polymer donor of poly (3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and the small molecular non-fullerene acceptor of 2, 2′-((2Z,2′Z)-(((4, 4, 9, 9-tetrakis(4-hexylphenyl)-4, 9-dihydro-sindaceno[1, 2-b:5, 6-b′]dithiophene-2, 7-diyl)bis(4-((2-ethylhexyl)oxy)thiophene-5, 2-diyl))bis-(methanylylidene))bis(5, 6-difluoro-3-oxo-2, 3-dihydro-1H-indene-2, 1-diylidene))dimalononitrile (IEICO-4F) host system. The fabricated OPD exhibited a high detectivity (D*) of 1.35 × 1012 Jones at 805 nm by adding 10 wt% PC71BM, which is 1.5 folds higher than it from the control system. The improved performance was mainly attributed to the increased light absorption in the short wavelength range and cascade energy level alignment, which is responsible for the efficient light harvesting and exciton utilization. Furthermore, the active layer morphology was optimized by adjusting the ratio of PC71BM acceptor, which efficiently enhances charge transport and mobility of the device as well as suppress bimolecular recombination. This work indicates that adding fullerene into non-fullerene system plays a positive effect on the device performance of panchromatic OPDs.