Spontaneous Emission and Nonadiabatic Electron Transfer Rates in Condensed Phases

Photoinduced Electron Transfer in Organic Solar Cells

Electron transfer (ET) is the key process in light-driven charge separation reactions in organic solar cells. The current review summarizes the progress in theoretical modelling of ET in these materials. First we give an account of ET, with a description originating from Marcus theory. We systematically go through all the relevant parameters and show how they depend on different material properties, and discuss the consequences such dependencies have for the performance of the devices. Finally, we present a set of visualization methods which have proven to be very useful in analyzing the elementary processes in absorption and charge separation events. Such visualization tools help us to understand the properties of the photochemical and photobiological systems in solar cells.

Towards a parameter-free characterization of charge transfer via hopping: the case of tris(8-hydroxyquinolato) aluminum

By using calculations based on density functional theory, we investigate the physical factors determining the elemental charge transfer in Alq3, taken as a prototype of molecular systems in condensed phase. The effect of the environment on the hopping of the charge carrier is evaluated self-consistently in a model in which an Alq3 dimer is embedded in an ensemble of permanent and polarizable dipoles, including orientational disorder and the presence of impurities. The results indicate that the origin of the activation barrier is mainly extrinsic and that the local orientation of the dipole moments plays a major role. The influence of nonadiabaticity is also studied and found to be more important for a hole than for an electron.