Achieving efficient organic solar cells and broadband photodetectors via simple compositional tuning of ternary blends

Abstract New access of functional organic electronics potentially yields exceptional Nano-gadgets with wide impacts. We report herein the first construction of panchromatic organic solar cell (OSC) and photodetector (OPD) via simple compositional tuning of ternary blends, wherein the modulation of fullerene ratio in near infrared (NIR) ternary blend (from low to high) effectively switches device charge transduction from the smooth carrier transfer and transport for photocurrent gain in photovoltaics, to the trap-limited dark current suppression in photodetectors. As results, excellent power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of 11.49% and 14.27% are achieved in single junction and tandem OSCs containing non-fullerene-dominated (NFD) ternary blends. More interestingly, further increase of fullerene content in ternary blend helps no photovoltaic performance gain, while effectively suppressing dark current of devices. Fullerene-dominated (FD) ternary blend facilitates self-powered OPD with excellent detectivity above 10 14 Jones over broad spectra range. These results establish that the effective yet simple strategy to access high-performance panchromatic ternary OSCs and OPDs.