The development of semiconducting polymers is imperative to improve the performance of polymer-based solar cells (PSCs). In this study, new semiconducting polymers based on naphtho[1,2-c:5,6-c']bis[1,2,5]thiadiazole (NTz), PNTz4TF2 and PNTz4TF4, having 3,3'-difluoro-2,2'-bithiophene and 3,3',4,4'-tetrafluoro-2,2'-bithiophene, respectively, are designed and synthesized. These polymers possess a deeper HOMO energy level than their counterpart, PNTz4T, which results in higher open-circuit voltages in solar cells. This concequently reduces the photon energy loss that is one of the most important issues surrounding PSCs. The PNTz4TF4 cell exhibits up to 6.5% power conversion efficiency (PCE), whereas the PNTz4TF2 cell demonstrates outstanding device performance with as high as 10.5% PCE, which is quite high for PSCs. We further discuss the performances of the PSCs based on these polymers by correlating the charge generation and recombination dynamics with the polymer structure and ordering structure. We believe that the results provide new insights into the design of semiconducting polymers and that there is still much room for improvement of PSC efficiency.

Controlling the energetics and backbone order of semiconducting polymers is essential for the performance improvement of polymer‐based solar cells. The use of fluorine as the substituent for the backbone is known to effectively deepen the molecular orbital energy levels and coplanarize the backbone by noncovalent interactions with sulfur of the thiophene ring. In this work, novel semiconducting polymers are designed and synthesized based on difluoronaphthobisthiadiazole (FNTz) as a new family of naphthobisthiadiazole (NTz)–quaterthiophene copolymer systems, which are one of the highest performing polymers in solar cells. The effect of the fluorination position on the energetics and backbone order is systematically studied. It is found that the dependence of the solar cell fill factor on the active layer thickness is very sensitive to the fluorination position. It is thus further investigated and discussed how the structural features of the polymers influence the photovoltaic parameters as well as the diode characteristics and bimolecular recombination. Further, the polymer with fluorine on both the naphthobisthiadiazole and quaterthiophene moieties exhibits a quite high power conversion efficiency of 10.8% in solar cells in combination with a fullerene. It is believed that the results would offer new insights into the development of semiconducting polymers.

N-type (electron-transporting) semiconducting polymers are essential materials for the development of truly plastic electronic devices. Here, we synthesized for the first time dithiazolylthienothiophene bisimide (TzBI), as a new family for imide-based electron-deficient πconjugated systems, and semiconducting polymers by incorporating TzBI into the π-conjugated backbone as the building unit. The TzBI-based polymers are found to have deep frontier molecular orbital energy levels and wide optical bandgaps compared to the dithienylthienothiophene bisimide (TBI) counterpart. It is also found that TzBI can promote the π-π intermolecular interactions of the polymer backbones relative to TBI most probably because the thiazole ring, which replaced the thiophene ring, at the end of the framework gives a more coplanar backbone. In fact, TzBIbased polymers function as the n-type semiconducting material in both organic field-effect transistor (OFET) and organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices. Notably, one of the TzBI-based polymers provides a power conversion efficiency of 3.3% in the all-polymer OPV device, which could be high for a low-molecular weight polymer (<10 kDa). Interestingly, while many of the ntype semiconducting polymers utilized in OPVs have narrow bandgaps, the TzBI-based polymers have wide bandgaps. This is highly beneficial for complementing the visible to near-IR light absorption range when blended with p-type narrow bandgap polymers that have been widely developed in the last decade. The results demonstrate great promise and possibility of TzBI as the building unit for n-type semiconducting polymers. ASSOCIATED CONTENT Supporting Information.

Suppression of nongeminate recombination due to long charge lifetime and low nonradiative loss is essential to highly efficient organic photovoltaics.

Polymer solar cells with a thick active layer can generate large photocurrent because they absorb many more photons. In most cases, however, the active layer is as thin as ~100 nm under the optimized condition. In this work, we have studied bimolecular charge recombination in highly efficient polymer solar cells with a thick active layer by transient photovoltage and photocurrent measurements. As a result, we found that the bimolecular recombination rate is smaller by three orders of magnitude than that predicted from the diffusion-limited Langevin recombination. We therefore conclude that such reduced bimolecular recombination enables efficient charge collection even in the solar cell with a thick active layer.