Identification of the nature of excitons in PPDT2FBT using electroabsorption spectroscopy

Abstract: Electroabsorption (EA) measurements can be used to identify the type of excitons contributing to the absorption spectra of semiconductors which have applications in optoelectronics. However, the inferences from the EA measurement greatly depend on the method of fitting and extraction of parameters from the measured spectra. We deconstruct the absorption spectrum by fitting multiple Gaussians and obtain the relative contribution of first and second derivative of each absorption band in EA spectrum, which gives indication of the Frenkel, charge transfer or mixed nature of the excitons involved. We check the applicability of the method for pentacene which is widely used and well studied organic semiconductor. We report EA measurements of poly(2,5-bis(2-hexyldecyloxy)-phenylene)-alt-(5,6-difluoro-4,7-di(thiophen-2-yl)benzo[c]-[1,2,5]-thiadiazole). Our analysis shows that besides the feature around 3.07 eV, which is strongly Frenkel-like, most of the absorption bands for PPDT2FBT are mixed states, having relatively high charge transfer contributions. Since charge transfer excitons have higher dissociation efficiencies, we infer PPDT2FBT to be a promising candidate for photovoltaic applications.