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.

Organic solar cells (OSCs) have attracted increasing attention due to their advantages of a low-cost, lightweight, rollable, and large-area fabrication. [1] Due to efforts in material design and device optimization, the efficiency of the single-junction OSCs has rapidly increased in recent years. [2] The photovoltaic materials (organic semiconductors) in OSCs must first absorb as

The ternary blend device demonstrates a significantly improved PCE of 12.07% with increased phase purity and reduced nonradiative energy loss.

The structural variation by just changing the linkage positions affects the molecular configuration, absorption, packing, charge transport and photovoltaic performance.

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