Fuller-Rylenes: Paving the Way for Promising Acceptors

Abstract

The hybridization of different acceptors remains a fertile ground awaiting exploration, to fully promote the properties of both components. The concept of this work is to exploit a new form of fuller-rylene hybrids as promising acceptors by integrating planar rylene dye and spherical fullerene for boosting the power conversion efficiency. The synthesis of the fuller-rylenes via a straightforward synthetic strategy by one-pot Pd-catalyzed cyclization can be scaled-up. Specifically, our strategy allows the supplements and enhancement of absorption in the visible region, much wider structural and electronic variations by installing R-1 groups as well as decorating R-2 on the perylene core at will, and good processability without compromising the superior characteristics of fullerene. Thus, bay-decorated fuller-rylene S-Fuller-PMI revealed a ground-breaking efficiency as high as 8.01%, even outperforming [6,6]-phenyl-C-61-butyric acid methyl ester (PC61BM) as a parallel comparison (7.09%). Our exploration paves a new way for the design of high-efficiency acceptors, which are promising alternatives to PC61BM in photovoltaic devices.