Abstract
Singlet exciton fission (SF), the conversion of one spin-singlet exciton (S1) into two spin-triplet excitons (T1), could provide a means to overcome the Shockley–Queisser limit in photovoltaics. SF as measured by the decay of S1 has been shown to occur efficiently and independently of temperature, even when the energy of S1 is as much as 200 meV less than that of 2T1. Here we study films of triisopropylsilyltetracene using transient optical spectroscopy and show that the triplet pair state (TT), which has been proposed to mediate singlet fission, forms on ultrafast timescales (in 300 fs) and that its formation is mediated by the strong coupling of electronic and vibrational degrees of freedom. This is followed by a slower loss of singlet character as the excitation evolves to become only TT. We observe the TT to be thermally dissociated on 10–100 ns timescales to form free triplets. This provides a model for ‘temperature-independent’ efficient TT formation and thermally activated TT separation.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-2017
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.2856
Funding Information
The authors thank the Winton Programme for the Physics of Sustainability and the EPSRC for funding. RHF thanks the Miller Institute for Basic Research and the Heising-Simons Foundation at UC Berkeley for support. The authors thank Dr. T. Arnold (Diamond Light Source), Dr. J. Novak, D. Harkin and J. Rozboril for support during the beamtime at beamline I07 and the Diamond Light Source for financial support. The computational work was supported by the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research, and Basic Energy Sciences.
Related Content
The data sets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the University of Cambridge data repository at https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.12611.
Supplementary information is available in the online version of the paper.
Repository Citation
Stern, Hannah L.; Cheminal, Alexandre; Yost, Shane R.; Broch, Katharina; Bayliss, Sam L.; Chen, Kai; Tabachnyk, Maxim; Thorley, Karl J.; Greenham, Neil; Hodgkiss, Justin; Anthony, John E.; Head-Gordon, Martin; Musser, Andrew J.; Rao, Akshay; and Friend, Richard H., "Vibronically Coherent Ultrafast Triplet-Pair Formation and Subsequent Thermally Activated Dissociation Control Efficient Endothermic Singlet Fission" (2017). Chemistry Faculty Publications. 154.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/chemistry_facpub/154
Supplementary Information
Notes/Citation Information
Published in Nature Chemistry, v. 9, no. 12, p. 1205-1212.
© 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved.
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Nature Chemistry. The definitive publisher-authenticated version Stern, H. L., Cheminal, A., Yost, S. R., Broch, K., Bayliss, S. L., Chen, K., ... Friend, R. H. (2017). Vibronically coherent ultrafast triplet-pair formation and subsequent thermally activated dissociation control efficient endothermic singlet fission. Nature Chemistry, 9, 1205-1212. https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.2856 is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1038/nchem.2856.