A smart strategy to significantly improve the energy conversion efficiency of the wide‐bandgap polymer P3HT blended in PCBM is demonstrated through NIR sensitization with a low‐bandgap polymer. An efficiency of over 4% is achieved by adding 30–40% of the low bandgap polymer Si‐PCPDTBT to the binary P3HT:PCBM blend, corresponding to an efficiency improvement of 25% compared to the P3HT:PCBM reference binary blend.
A series of step-ladder copolymers based on thiophene-phenylene-thiophene SL1-SL3 and thiophene-naphthylene-thiophene SL4 repeat units with varying lengths of the oligothiophene segment has been designed and synthesized via a microwave-assisted Stille-type cross-coupling reaction followed by a polymeranalogous cyclization reaction. The optical properties of the step-ladder copolymers have been investigated in detail, in particular at low temperature and in the solidstate.
A new soluble polyamine with main chain perylene units is synthesized and subsequently converted into cationic or zwitterionic polyelectrolytes. The optical properties of the monomer 1,6,7,12-tetrakis(4-tert-butylphenoxy)-3,4,9,10-tetra(bromomethyl)perylene and the resulting polymers have been studied with special attention to ongoing de/aggregation processes. UV-Vis and PL spectra of the polymers show a distinct concentration and solvent dependency of the optical properties. In contrast to the corresponding monomer complete deaggregation did not occur for the polymers. The environment-sensitive optical properties should allow applications as sensor materials. The perylene-containing polyelectrolytes may be applied in orthogonal processing schemes toward multilayer electronic devices.
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