| Boron subphthalocyanines (BsubPcs) are a class of organic semiconductor materials that have been identified as having desirable properties for use in photovoltaic devices due to their strong light absorbance and the flexibility to develop tunable chemical derivatives. In particular, a lack of variety in available electron acceptors is an area where BsubPc derivatives can be readily substituted into existing photovoltaic device architectures. There are, however, no metrics to facilitate the rapid screening of different BsubPc derivatives. In this thesis, admittance spectroscopy is used to measure charge carrier mobility of these BsubPc derivatives, and photovoltaic cells are fabricated to evaluate these derivatives' performance in devices. We find that the measured electron carrier mobilities in thin films of BsubPc correlate with the single crystal structural parameters determined by X-ray diffraction. We also find that for BsubPcs, electron mobility measured by admittance spectroscopy is insufficient to predict photovoltaic performance when BsubPcs are used as an electron accepting layer in a device. BsubPc derivatives, however, are discovered as a new class of versatile molecules that can be designed and synthesized for use in photovoltaic devices to harvest singlet fission derived triplet excitons and consequently boost photovoltaic device photocurrent. This thesis also reports vacuum system design and construction to address experimental challenges arising from dealing with low solubility, high molar mass materials and limited amounts of high purity material. |
