Solar cells based on semi-random P3HT analogues containing dithienopyrrole: influence of incorporating a strong donor

Novel semi-random poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) based polymers P3HTT-DTP, P3HTT-BTD-DTP, P3HTT-TP-DTP and P3HTT-DPP-DTP containing the strong donor dithienopyrrole (DTP) as well as different acceptors (benzothiadiazole (BTD), thienopyrazine (TP) or diketopyrrolopyrrole (DPP)) were synthesized by Stille copolymerization and their optical, electrochemical, charge transport, and photovoltaic properties were investigated. All polymers (except for the all donor polymer P3HTT-DTP) show considerably broadened absorption compared to P3HT due to the donor-acceptor effect and their multichromophoric nature. The introduction of the strong donor DTP leads to increased HOMO energies and thus decreased open-circuit voltage (V-oc) (compared to previously published semi-random polymers) as well as an amorphous character of P3HTT-DTP, P3HTT-BTD-DTP and P3HTT-TP-BTD resulting in low hole mobilities and moderate solar cell efficiencies (0.18% to 0.36%). The exception is P3HTT-DPP-DTP, which is semi-crystalline and has a high hole mobility of 1.4 x 10(-4) cm(2) V-1 s(-1) comparable to P3HT, as well as increased photocurrent (10.7 mA/cm(2)) due to broad and uniform photoresponse up to 850 nm leading to a promising non-optimized device efficiency of 2.83%. (C) 2012 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). [DOI: 10.1117/1.JPE.2.021002]