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Free, publicly-accessible full text available October 24, 2024
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Abstract Inorganic–organic mesophase materials provide a wide range of tunable properties, which are often highly dependent on their nano‐, micro‐, or meso‐scale compositions and structures. Among these are macroscopic orientational order and corresponding anisotropic material properties, the adjustability of which are difficult to achieve. This is due to the complicated transient and coupled transport, chemical reaction, and surface processes that occur during material syntheses. By understanding such processes, general criteria are established and used to prepare diverse mesostructured materials with highly aligned channels with uniform nanometer dimensions and controllable directionalities over macroscopic dimensions and thicknesses. This is achieved by using a micropatterned semipermeable poly(dimethylsiloxane) stamp to manage the rates, directions, and surfaces at which self‐assembling phases nucleate and the directions that they grow. This enables mesostructured surfactant‐directed silica and titania composites, including with functional guest species, and mesoporous carbons to be prepared with high degrees of hexagonal order, as well as controllable orthogonal macroscopic orientational order. The resulting materials exhibit novel anisotropic properties, as demonstrated by the example of direction‐dependent photocurrent generation, and are promising for enhancing the functionality of inorganic–organic nanocomposite materials in separations, catalysis, and energy conversion applications.
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Organic solar cells that are transparent to visible light are highly desirable for applications such as window treatments or solar greenhouse panels. A key challenge is to simultaneously transmit most photons between 400 and 700 nm while retaining a high short‐circuit current and power conversion efficiency (PCE). Here, organic bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cells consisting of a donor polymer (PM2) is reported and the non‐fullerene acceptor ITIC‐Th achieves a PCE of 9.3%, and the BHJ thin films exhibit an average visible transmittance over 40%. This value is achieved primarily due to a very high open‐circuit voltage (
V OC) of 0.93 V, which represents a voltage loss of only 0.50 V relative to the material optical bandgap,E opt. In PM2:PC61BM devices, this voltage loss increases to 0.62 V (V OC = 0.82 V). It is found that this difference inV OCis due to higher nonradiative recombination in the fullerene‐based solar cell, suggesting that non‐fullerene acceptors may lead to better performance in semi‐transparent devices. The optoelectronic properties associated with PM2:ITIC‐Th and PM2:PC61BM blends are further corroborated by different morphological features and local structures at the donor‐acceptor interfaces characterized by atomic force microscopy, X‐ray scattering, and solid‐state NMR spectroscopy techniques.