2,5-dichloro-3,4-diiodothiophene as a versatile solid additive for high-performance organic solar cells

Volatile solid additive (SA) with diverse chemical structures has been proved to be an alternative to prepare high-efficient organic solar cells (OSCs). While, various organic photovoltaic materials raise challenges in selecting suitable SAs during the device optimization. Herein, based on the simple and commonly used thiophene unit, we proposed a perhalogenated 2,5-dichloro-3,4-diiodothiophene (SA-T5) as the SA for the device optimizations. As results, the capacity of SA-T5 in optimizing molecular packings of small-molecualr acceptor L8-BO, dimeric acceptor DL8, and polymeric acceptor PY-DT based blend films has been demonstated. Their optimized morphologies assisted by SA-T5 contribute to the suppressed charge recombination and enhanced charge transportation, resulting in their improved short-circuit current density and fill factor, simultaneously. In comparsion with as-cast devices, SA-T5-treated devices showed significantly improved power conversion efficiencies (PCEs) of 18.8% for PM6:L8-BO, 17.8% for PM6:DL8, and 17.6% for PM6:PY-DT, respectively. Furthermore, the potential of SA-T5 in obtaining high-performance ternary OSCs was also confirmed, for example, a 18.1% efficiency was realized in PM6:DL8:L8-BO based device. To our knowledge, the performance of these SA-T5-treated devices reaches the best results of different acceptor-based OSCs. Importantly, this work provides a rare and successful case to develop versatile SAs for high-performance OSCs.