Exciton lifetime in donor-acceptor-donor planar dumbbell-shaped triazatruxene-thienopyrroledione derivatives

Organic semiconductor materials such as planar conjugated small molecules are of great interest to the photovoltaic community. In thin films, the exciton and charge carrier dynamics, which are crucial to photovoltaic device operation, depend in a non-trivial way on the organic molecular structure and on the molecular organization in the solid state. Recently, the exciton diffusion has been found to strongly depend on the crystalline order of the organic thin films. This work presents the study of the exciton lifetime in an innovative class of molecular semiconductors able to present different crystalline order. This family of molecules has a “dumbbell-shaped” structure based on triazatruxene units that act as a π-stacking platform. Such molecules with different side-chains have been found to self-assemble into various crystalline and liquid crystalline phases. We have studied the steady-state photoluminescence and the exciton lifetime for several triazatruxene-based derivatives with different side-chains, in solution and in thin films for different solid state phases. In solution, the fluorescence lifetime corresponds to the reference value that can be obtained without intermolecular interaction. In thin films, we measured the exciton lifetime for different molecular structures in order to correlate the exciton dynamics with the molecular stacking. The results reveal a significant increase in the exciton lifetime with the enhancement of the structural order.