Annealing effect on donor-acceptor interface and its impact on the performance of organic photovoltaic devices based on PSiF-DBT copolymer and C₆₀

In this work, poly[2,7-(9,9-bis(2-ethylhexyl)-dibenzosilole)-alt-4,7-bis(thiophen-2-yl)benzo-2,1,3-thiadiazole] (PSiF-DBT) was used as active layer in bilayer solar cell with C60 as electron acceptor. As cast devices already show reasonable power conversion efficiency (PCE) that increases to 4% upon annealing at 100 °C. Space charge limited measurements of the hole mobility (μ) in PSiF-DBT give μ ∼ 1.0 × 10−4 cm2/(V s) which does not depend on the temperature of the annealing treatment. Moreover, positron annihilation spectroscopy experiments revealed that PSiF-DBT films are well stacked even without the thermal treatment. The variations in the transport of holes upon annealing are then small. As a consequence, the PCE rise was mainly induced by the increase of the polymer surface roughness that leads to a more effective interface for exciton dissociation at the PSiF-DBT/fullerene heterojunction.