2 Molecular design of non-fullerene acceptors (NFAs) is of vital importance for highefficiency organic solar cells. The branched alkyl chain modification is often regarded as a counter-intuitive approach as which may introduce undesirable steric hindrance that reduces charge transport in NFAs. Here we show the design and synthesis of a highly efficient NFA family by substituting the beta position of thiophene unit on Y6-based A-DAD-A backbone with branched alkyl chains. It was found that such modification of different alkyl chain length could completely change the molecular packing behavior of NFAs, leading to improved structure order and charge transport in thin films. Unprecedented efficiency of 18.32% (certified value of 17.9%) with a fill factor of 81.5% is achieved for single-junction organic solar cells. This work reveals the importance of branched alkyl chain topology in tuning the molecular packing and blend morphology that leads to improved organic photovoltaic performance.

In organic photovoltaics, morphological control of donor and acceptor domains on the nanoscale is key for efficient exciton diffusion and dissociation, carrier transport, and suppression of recombination losses. To realise this, here, we demonstrated a double-fibril network based on ternary donor:acceptor morphology with multi-length scales constructed by combining ancillary conjugated polymer crystallizers and non-fullerene acceptor filament assembly. Using this approach, we achieved an average power conversion efficiency of 19.3% (certified 19.2%). The success lies in the good match between the photoelectric parameters and the morphological characteristic lengths, which utilizes the excitons and free charges efficiently. This strategy leads to enhanced exciton diffusion length (hence exciton dissociation yield) and reduced recombination rate, hence minimizing photon-to-electron losses in the ternary devices as compared to their binary counterparts. The double-fibril network morphology strategy minimizes losses and maximizes the power output, offering the possibility towards 20% power conversion efficiencies in single-junction organic photovoltaics. MainOrganic semiconductors offer the advantage of high optical absorption and tunable energy levels, enabling thin-film solar cells with high light-to-electron conversion efficiencies over a wide range of wavelengths [1][2][3][4] . Desipte recent progresses, the performance of organic solar cells (OSCs) is still limited by non-ideal exciton and charge transport, which depend not only on the electronic structure of organic semiconductors but also on the nanostructure that is formed by material crystallization and phase separation in a bulk heterojunction (BHJ) setting [5][6][7][8] . A suitable sized phase-separated morphology that balances crystalline region and mixing domain on the nanoscale is therefore needed to further push the power conversion efficiency (PCE) of OSCs, however it is a

Non-fullerene fused-ring electron acceptors boost the power conversion efficiency of organic solar cells, but they suffer from high synthetic cost and low yield. Here, we show a series of low-cost noncovalently fused-ring electron acceptors, which consist of a ladder-like core locked by noncovalent sulfur–oxygen interactions and flanked by two dicyanoindanone electron-withdrawing groups. Compared with that of similar but unfused acceptor, the presence of ladder-like structure markedly broadens the absorption to the near-infrared region. In addition, the use of intramolecular noncovalent interactions avoids the tedious synthesis of covalently fused-ring structures and markedly lowers the synthetic cost. The optimized solar cells displayed an outstanding efficiency of 13.24%. More importantly, solar cells based on these acceptors demonstrate very low non-radiative energy losses. This research demonstrates that low-cost noncovalently fused-ring electron acceptors are promising to achieve high-efficiency organic solar cells.

Ternary structure has been demonstrated as an effective strategy to realize high power conversion efficiency (PCE) in organic solar cells (OSCs), however general materials selection rules still remain incompletely understood. In this work, two non-fullerene small molecule acceptors 3TP3T-4F and 3TP3T-IC are synthesized and incorporated as the third component in the PM6:Y6 binary blends. The photovoltaic behaviors in the resultant ternary OSCs differ significantly, despite the comparable energy levels. We found that incorporation of 15% 3TP3T-4F into the PM6:Y6 blend results in facilitating exciton dissociation, increasing charge transport and reducing trap-assisted recombination. All these features are

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