Data-Driven Discovery of Organic Electronic Materials Enabled by Hybrid Top-Down/Bottom-Up Design

The high-throughput exploration and screening of molecules for organic electronics involves either a 'top-down' curation and mining of existing repositories, or a 'bottom-up' assembly of user-defined fragments based on known synthetic templates. Both are time-consuming approaches requiring significant resources to compute electronic properties accurately. Here, 'top-down' is combined with 'bottom-up' through automatic assembly and statistical models, thus providing a platform for the fragment-based discovery of organic electronic materials. This study generates a top-down set of 117K synthesized molecules containing structures, electronic and topological properties and chemical composition, and uses them as building blocks for bottom-up design. A tool is developed to automate the coupling of these building blocks at their C(sp2/sp)-H bonds, providing a fundamental link between the two dataset construction philosophies. Statistical models are trained on this dataset and a subset of resulting top-down/bottom-up compounds, enabling on-the-fly prediction of ground and excited state properties with high accuracy across organic compound space. With access to ab initio-quality optical properties, this bottom-up pipeline may be applied to any materials design campaign using existing compounds as building blocks. To illustrate this, over a million molecules are screened for singlet fission. tThe leading candidates provide insight into the features promoting this multiexciton-generating process.

Rational Construction of Highly Tunable Donor-Acceptor Materials Based on a Crystalline Host-Guest Platform

Organic donor-acceptor systems have attracted much attention due to their various potential applications. However, the rational construction and modulation of highly ordered donor-acceptor systems could be a challenge due to the complicated self-assembly process of donor and acceptor species. Considering the well-defined arrangement of species at the molecule level, a crystalline host-guest system could be an ideal platform for the rational construction of donor-acceptor systems. Herein, it is shown how the rational construction of highly tunable donor-acceptor materials can be achieved based on a crystalline host-guest platform. Within the well-established metal-organic framework NKU-111 as the crystalline host enabled by the relatively stable coordination-directed assembly, the introduction and arrangement of guest molecules in the crystals allow the rational construction of the NKU-111⊃guest donor-acceptor system. The donor-acceptor interaction in the systems can be readily modulated with different guest molecules, which can be justified by the well-demonstrated guest-dependent characteristics. Accordingly, the NKU-111⊃guest reveals highly tunable donor-acceptor properties such as charge-transfer-based emissions and electrical conductivity. This work indicates the potential of crystalline host-guest systems as an ideal platform for systematic investigations of donor-acceptor materials.

Laser Rewritable Dichroics through Reconfigurable Organic Charge-Transfer Liquid Crystals

Charge-transfer materials based on the self-assembly of aromatic donor-acceptor complexes enable a modular organic-synthetic approach to develop and fine-tune electronic and optical properties, and thus these material systems stand to impact a wide range of technologies. Through laser-induction of temperature gradients, in this study, user-defined patterning of strongly dichroic and piezoelectric organic thin films composed of donor-acceptor columnar liquid crystals is shown. Fine, reversible control over isotropic versus anisotropic regions in thin films is demonstrated, enabling noncontact writing/rewriting of micropolarizers, bar codes, and charge-transfer based devices.

Synthesis and Characterization of a Soluble A-D-A Molecule Containing a 2D Conjugated Selenophene-Based Side Group for Organic Solar Cells

A new acceptor-donor-acceptor (A-D-A) small molecule based on benzodithiophene (BDT) and diketopyrrolopyrrole (DPP) is synthesized via a Stille cross-coupling reaction. A highly conjugated selenophene-based side group is incorporated into each BDT unit to generate a 2D soluble small molecule (SeBDT-DPP). SeBDT-DPP thin films produce two distinct absorption peaks. The shorter wavelength absorption (400 nm) is attributed to the BDT units containing conjugated selenophene-based side groups, and the longer wavelength band is due to the intramolecular charge transfer between the BDT donor and the DPP acceptor. SeBDT-DPP thin films can harvest a broad solar spectrum covering the range 350-750 nm and have a low bandgap energy of 1.63 eV. Solution-processed field-effect transistors fabricated with this small molecule exhibit p-type organic thin film transistor characteristics, and the field-effect mobility of a SeBDT-DPP device is measured to be 2.3 × 10^-3 cm² V^-1 s^-1 . A small molecule solar cell device is prepared by using SeBDT-DPP as the active layer is found to exhibit a power conversion efficiency of 5.04% under AM 1.5 G (100 mW cm^-2 ) conditions.

High-Performance Non-Fullerene Polymer Solar Cells Based on a Pair of Donor-Acceptor Materials with Complementary Absorption Properties

A 7.3% efficiency non-fullerene polymer solar cell is realized by combining a large-bandgap polymer PffT2-FTAZ-2DT with a small-bandgap acceptor IEIC. The complementary absorption of donor polymer and small-molecule acceptor is responsible for the high-performance of the solar-cell device. This work provides important guidance to improve the performance of non-fullerene polymer solar cells.