English

Exciton dissociation mediated by phonons in organic photovoltaics

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2023-05-24 v1 Materials Science

Abstract

It is well known that phonons can overscreen the bare Coulomb electron-electron repulsion, turning it into the effective attraction that binds the Cooper pairs responsible for BCS superconductivity. Here, we use a simple lattice model to prove that the counterpart of this is also possible, whereby phonons overscreen the bare electron-hole attraction and may turn it repulsive at short distances, driving exciton dissociation in certain regions of the parameter space. We argue that this phonon-mediated short-range screening plays an important role in the physics of organic solar cell materials (and other materials with strong electron-phonon coupling) and could point the way to new strategies for optimizing their efficiencies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2301.03530,
  title  = {Exciton dissociation mediated by phonons in organic photovoltaics},
  author = {Stepan Fomichev and Leonard Ruocco and Alexandra Tully and Mona Berciu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.03530},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

11 pages, 6 figures