Does Singlet Fission Enhance the Performance of Organic Solar Cells?

Abstract

Singlet fission, in which the optical spin-singlet exciton dissociates into two low energy triplet excitons, has been proposed as a viable approach to enhance the quantum efficiency of organic solar cells. We show that even when singlet fission is occurring in the donor molecule, the electronic structure at the donor$-$acceptor interface must satisfy specific requirements for the solar cell performance to be enhanced by this process. We focus on the pentacene$-$C${}_{60}$ solar cell, and on the basis of our calculations and available experimental data, we conclude that there is not enough evidence that these requirements are met by the donor$-$acceptor interface here. We propose experiments that can determine whether the minimal requirement for enhanced performance driven by singlet fission is met in this and other solar cells.

12 pages, 5 figures (including the Table of Contents)

References in corpus (2)

• Morphology Effectively Controls Singlet-Triplet Exciton Relaxation and Charge Transport in Organic Semiconductors
• Quantitative calculations of the excitonic energy spectra of semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes within a $\pi$-electron model

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Theory of Singlet Fission in Polyenes, Acene Crystals and Covalently Linked Acene Dimers
• Anticipating acene-based chromophore spectra with molecular orbital arguments
• Inverse molecular design from first principles: tailoring organic chromophore spectra for optoelectronic applications