Tuning Electronic and Morphological Properties for High-Performance Wavelength-Selective Organic Near-Infrared Cavity Photodetectors

Incorporation of compact spectroscopic near-infrared (NIR) light detectors into various wearable and handheld devices opens up new applications, such as on-the-spot medical diagnostics. To extend beyond the detection window of silicon, i.e., past 1000 nm, organic semiconductors are highly attractive because of their tunable absorption. In particular, organic NIR wavelength-selective detectors have been realized by incorporating donor:acceptor thin films, exhibiting weak intermolecular charge-transfer (CT) absorption, into an optical microcavity architecture. In this work, the alkyl side chains of the well-known PBTTT donor polymer are replaced by alkoxy substituents, hereby redshifting the CT absorption of the polymer:PC₆₁BM blend. It is shown that the unique fullerene intercalation features of the PBTTT polymer are retained when half of the side chains are altered, hereby maximizing the polymer:fullerene interfacial area and thus the CT absorption strength. This is exploited to extend the detection range of organic narrow-band photodetectors with a full-width-at-half-maximum of 30–38 nm to wavelengths between 840 and 1340 nm, yielding detectivities in the range of 5 × 10¹¹ to 1.75 × 10¹⁰ Jones, despite the low CT state energy of 0.98 eV. The broad wavelength tuning range achieved using a single polymer:fullerene blend renders this system an ideal candidate for miniature NIR spectrophotometers.