ISIS Neutron and Muon Source Data Journal

Effects of post-annealing treatment on phase mixing behaviour in organic evaporated thin films

Abstract: The focus of this proposal is understanding how post annealing treatment impacts the microstructure of organic photovoltaics (OPV) made via vacuum thermal evaporation (VTE). To date, OPVs with record efficiencies have been solution processed. Despite being behind in terms of efficiency, the VTE OPV field is closer to commercialisation, due to their homogeneous large area deposition, cleaner production and simplicity in synthesising small molecules. The microstructure of films in an all small-molecule solar cell has been shown to have a great impact on the performance of devices, playing a significant part in light absorption, exciton diffusion length, charge carrier mobility and recombination. The crystallinity, molecular orientation and phase segregation of an evaporated thin film all contribute to the solar cell performance, therefore understanding how microstructure can be manipulated in order to maximise efficiency is essential. Small angle neutron scattering (SANS) is ideal for investigating the effects of annealing treatments, since we expect it to impact domain purity and size, lending itself to the hydrogen sensitivity of SANS. We have previously undertaken studies using SANS to study the mixing behaviour of evaporated thin films based on various OPV molecules. We seek to perform SANS on a set of VTE films that have received post deposition annealing treatments. From this, we can take known microstructure tuning strategies and understand their impact on in VTE OPV.

Experimenter: Dr Pascal Kaienburg
Local Contact: Dr Robert Dalgliesh
Experimenter: Dr Moritz Riede
Experimenter: Ms O Gough

DOI: 10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2310099

ISIS Experiment Number: RB2310099

Publisher: STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source

Data format: RAW/Nexus
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Data Citation

The recommended format for citing this dataset in a research publication is as:
[author], [date], [title], [publisher], [doi]

For Example:
Dr Pascal Kaienburg et al; (2023): Effects of post-annealing treatment on phase mixing behaviour in organic evaporated thin films, STFC ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.RB2310099

Data is released under the CC-BY-4.0 license.