Chemical Communications Blog

Interactions that control the molecular ordering of fullerene are rare. This is a problem for scientists designing fullerene-based photovoltaic devices and field effect transistors, as the fullerenes must be ordered in the solid state to achieve high carrier mobility.

Now Eiichi Nakamura, at the University of Tokyo, Japan, and colleagues think they may have discovered an effective way to organise fullerene. They found that a perfluoro aromatic ring interacts face-to-face with fullerene resulting in close fullerene-fullerene contact. By attaching C₆H₅ groups to C₆₀, they showed they could form an ordered crystalline arrangement of fullerenes in the solid state.

Nakamura tested the performance of the fullerenes in a thin film photovoltaic device and achieved a power conversion efficiency of 1.5 %. The group now plan to do detailed physical studies on the device performance.

Read more in Nakamura’s ChemComm communication, free to access until 22nd November.