Two wide-bandgap fluorine-substituted benzotriazole based terpolymers for efficient polymer solar cells

Abstract In this work, the fluorine substituted benzotriazole (FBTz) unit is introduced into terpolymers for the first time. FBTz as an acceptor unit was added to the terpolymers of PTT-FBTz and PTTz-FBTz, in which the bithiophene (biTh) unit is used as the donor unit and thieno[3,2- b ]thiophene (TT) or thiazolo[5,4- d ]thiazole (TTz) is adopted as a third component, respectively. Compared to PTT-FBTz with TT as the third component, PTTz-FBTz with TTz showed pronounced aggregated shoulder peaks both in solution and film absorption spectra. Electrochemical cyclic voltammetry (CV) shows PTTz-FBTz possesses both lower HOMO/LUMO level than PTT-FBTz due to the higher electronegativity of nitrogen atoms in TTz unit. Subsequently, the bulk-heterojunction polymer solar cells (PSCs) based on PTTz-FBTz show a higher power conversion efficiency of 7.03%, which is much higher than those of PTT-FBTz based devices (PCE = 2.63%). The enhancement of photovoltaic performance based on PTTz-FBTz is mainly attributed to the deeper highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) level, higher carrier transport and better molecular packing.