Backbone Fluorination of Polythiophenes Improves Device Performance of Non-Fullerene Polymer Solar Cells

Polythiophenes (PTs) are promising donor materials for the industrialization of polymer solar cells (PSCs) due to the merits of easy synthesis, low cost, and large-scale producibility. The rapid progress of non-fullerene acceptors requires the development of new PTs for use in non-fullerene PSCs. In this work, we present a set of PTs with different degrees of backbone fluorination (P6T-F00, P6T-F50, P6T-F75, and P6T-F100) to investigate the effect of fluorination on the photovoltaic properties of PTs in non-fullerene PSCs. Upon increasing fluorine content, the PTs tend to have higher crystallinity, higher absorption coefficients, and enhanced relative dielectric constants. When blended with a non-fullerene acceptor EH-IDTBR, the blend films show increased photoluminescence quenching efficiency, reduced charge recombination loss, and extended charge carrier lifetime along with increasing fluorine content of PTs. These positive factors collectively result in dramatically improved power conversion efficiency from 4.3% for P6T-F00:EH-IDTBR to 7.3% for P6T-F100:EH-IDTBR, which is superior to the champion binary non-fullerene PSCs based on P3HT. Our results demonstrate that PTs are promising donor materials for non-fullerene PSCs via backbone fluorination.