Non-fullerene small molecule electron acceptors for high-performance organic solar cells

Fullerenes and their derivatives are important types of electron acceptor materials and play a vital role in organic solar cell devices. However, the fullerene acceptor material has some difficulties to overcome the intrinsic shortcomings, such as weak absorption in the visible range, difficulty in modification and high cost, which limit the performance of the device and the large-scale application of this type of acceptors. In recent years, non-fullerene electron acceptor material has attracted the attention of scientists due to the advantages of adjustable energy level, wide absorption, simple synthesis, low processing cost and good solubility. Researchers can use the rich chemical means to design and synthesize organic small molecules and their oligomers with specific aggregation morphology and excellent optoelectronic properties. Great advances in the field of synthesis, device engineering, and device physics of non-fullerene acceptors have been achieved in the last few years. At present, non-fullerene small molecules based photovoltaic devices achieve the highest efficiency more than 13% and the efficiency gap between fullerene-type and non-fullerene-type photovoltaic devices is gradually narrowing. In this review, we explore recent progress of non-fullerene small molecule electron acceptors that have been developed and led to high-efficiency photovoltaic devices and put forward the prospect of development in the future. (C) 2017 Science Press and Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Published by Elsevier B.V. and Science Press. All rights reserved.