Encounter-Limited Charge Carrier Recombination in Phase Separated Organic Semiconductor Blends

TL;DR

This study uses kinetic Monte Carlo simulations to analyze how phase separation affects charge recombination in organic semiconductors, revealing that domain size and mobility influence recombination rates and that phase separation modestly reduces recombination compared to classical models.

Contribution

It provides a unified model describing the mobility dependence of recombination rates in phase-separated organic blends, incorporating domain size effects.

Findings

Recombination rate depends on the power mean of electron and hole mobilities.

Phase separation reduces recombination rate by less than one order of magnitude.

Mobility dependence can be approximated by the geometric mean for typical domain sizes.

Abstract

The theoretical effects of phase separation on encounter-limited charge carrier recombination in organic semiconductor blends are investigated using kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) simulations of pump-probe experiments. Using model bulk heterojunction morphologies, the dependence of the recombination rate on domain size and charge carrier mobility are quantified. Unifying competing models and simulation results, we show that the mobility dependence of the recombination rate can be described using the power mean of the electron and hole mobilities with a domain size dependent exponent. Additionally, for domain sizes typical of organic photovoltaic devices, we find that phase separation reduces the recombination rate by less than one order of magnitude compared to the Langevin model and that the mobility dependence can be approximated by the geometric mean.