Coulomb polymer heterojunctions

Recently, geminate polaron pairs have been proposed for polymer-polymer [35,56,57] and polymer-fullerene [58,59] blends as photoinduced intermediates. Here the hole and electron remain coulombically bound across the interface of the donor-acceptor heterojunction. Only via an electric field and/or a temperature-assisted secondary process, these geminate polaron pairs are dissociated, leading to free charge carriers. This can have a considerable effect on the achievable charge separation efficiencies, since the geminate... 

The electronic structure of interfacial excitations was recently described by Beljonne, Herz, Friend, and coworkers [38,88]. Static dipoles in the ground state of one polymer chain are considered to modulate the exciton energy on the neighboring polymer chains by Coulomb interactions across the heterojunction. Depending on the relative position of the chains, attractive or repulsive interaction were found, which respectively stabilize or obstruct charge-transfer state formation [88]. This implies that the density of states of interfacial excitons is broader than that for bulk excitons. Indeed, this was experimentally observed by femtosecond time-resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy in the same study [88]. The broader density of states at the heterojunction is consistent with the fast directional motion toward the interface described above (see Section 13.3.1) [87]). Excitons could transfer quickly into lower energy interfacial sites when they approach the interfacial region. 

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