Simple near-infrared electron acceptors for efficient photovoltaics and sensitive photodetectors

Although promising progress has been made in near-infrared (NIR) electron acceptors for broadening photoresponse of optoelectronics, there are still strong needs for efficient NIR materials with low synthetic complexities. In this work, three simple NIR acceptors are developed with absorption up to 1000 nm and possessing the same dithiophene cores with varied heteroatom linkages to carbon (C) atom for W1, to silicon (Si) for W2, and to nitrogen (N) for W3. It is found that the tuning of only one atom for simple acceptors can surprisingly lead to a large difference in photoelectric properties and solid stacking, as well as the performance in optoelectronics. Although quite simple, these electron acceptors, especially W1 (C), can also perform quite efficiently as organic photovoltaics (OPVs) as well as sensitive organic photodetectors (OPDs) when blended with PTB7-Th polymer. It is worthy to note that, among the representative NIR acceptors with over 950 nm absorption, W1 possesses one of the best figure-of-merit when considering the photoelectric performance versus synthetic complexity of materials. As a result, the PTB7-Th:W1-based OPDs reach a fast temporal response, ultralow-light intensity detection of 1.70 × 10-11 W·cm-2, and a high specific detectivity of 4.28 × 1012 cm·Hz1/2·W-1 at 830 nm, representing a highly sensitive self-powered OPD approach the commercial broadband silicon detectors. These simple structure materials provide a potential example for further application of NIR electron acceptor.