Spatial Balance of Photogenerated Charge Carriers in Active Layers of Polymer Solar Cells

Bulk heterojunction polymer solar cells (PSCs) blended with non-fullerene-type acceptors (NFAs) possess good solar power conversion efficiency and compatibility with flexible electronics, rendering them good candidates for mobile photovoltaic applications. However, their internal absorption performance and mechanism are yet to be fully elucidated because of their complicated interference effect caused by their multilayer device structure. The transfer matrix method (TMM) is ideal for analyzing complex optical electric fields by considering multilayer interference effects. In this study, an active layer (AL) thickness-dependent TMM is used to obtain accurate information on the photon-capturing mechanisms of NFA-based PSCs for comparison with experimental results. Devices with AL thicknesses of 40–350 nm were prepared, and the AL-thickness-dependent device parameters with incident photon-to-current efficiency spectra were compared with the calculated internal absorption spectra of the TMM. The spectrally and spatially resolved spectra as a function of the AL thickness and excitation wavelength revealed that the power conversion efficiency of the NFA-blended PSC decreased with the increasing AL thickness after reaching a maximum of ~100 nm; by contrast, the internal absorption efficiency showed the opposite trend. Furthermore, the TMM spectra indicated that the spatial distribution of the photogenerated charge carriers became significantly imbalanced as the AL thickness increased, implying that the AL-dependent loss stemmed from the discrepancy between the absorption and the extracted charge carriers.