Kam Sing Wong

Boron dipyrromethene (BODIPY) derivatives 1 and 2 consisting of donor and acceptor units with dual photoresponses to solvent polarity and luminogen aggregation are developed through taking advantage of twisted intramolecular charge transfer (TICT) and aggregation-induced emission (AIE) processes. In nonpolar solvents, the locally excited (LE) states of the BODIPY luminogens emit intense green lights. Increasing solvent polarity brings the luminogens from the LE state to the TICT state, causing a large bathochromic shift in the emission color but a dramatic decrease in the emission efficiency. The red emission is greatly boosted by aggregate formation or AIE effect: addition of large amounts of water into the solutions of 1 and 2 in the polar solvents causes the luminogens to aggregate supramolecularly and to emit efficiently. The emission can be enhanced by increasing solvent viscosity and decreasing solution temperature, indicating that the AIE effect is caused by the restriction of the intramolecular rotations in the aggregates of the luminogens.

A major challenge for organic solar cell (OSC) research is how to minimize the tradeoff between voltage loss and charge generation. In early 2019, we reported a non-fullerene acceptor (named Y6) that can simultaneously achieve high external quantum efficiency and low voltage loss for OSC. Here, we use a combination of experimental and theoretical modeling to reveal the structure-property-performance relationships of this state-of-the-art OSC system. We find that the distinctive π-π molecular packing of Y6 not only exists in molecular single crystals but also in thin films. Importantly, such molecular packing leads to (i) the formation of delocalized and emissive excitons that enable small non-radiative voltage loss, and (ii) delocalization of electron wavefunctions at donor/acceptor interfaces that significantly reduces the Coulomb attraction between interfacial electron-hole pairs. These properties are critical in enabling highly efficient charge generation in OSC systems with negligible donor-acceptor energy offset.

Defects in three different types of ZnO nanostructures before and after annealing under different conditions were studied. The annealing atmosphere and temperature were found to strongly affect the yellow and orange-red defect emissions, while green emission was not significantly affected by annealing. The defect emissions exhibited a strong dependence on the temperature and excitation wavelength, with some defect emissions observable only at low temperatures and for certain excitation wavelengths. The yellow emission in samples prepared by a hydrothermal method is likely due to the presence of OH groups, instead of the commonly assumed interstitial oxygen defect. The green and orange-red emissions are likely due to donor acceptor transitions involving defect complexes, which likely include zinc vacancy complexes in the case of orange-red emissions. © IOP Publishing Ltd.

Recently, researchers have focused on the design of highly efficient flexible perovskite solar cells (PVSCs), which enables the implementation of portable and roll-to-roll fabrication in large scale. While NiOx is a promising material for hole transport layer (HTL) candidate for fabricating efficient PVSCs on a rigid substrate, the reported NiOx HTLs are formed using different multistep treatments (such as 300-500 °C annealing, O2-plasma, UVO, etc.), which hinders the development of flexible PVSCs based on NiOx. Meanwhile, the features of nanostructured morphology and flawless film quality are very important for the film to function as highly effective HTL of PVSCs. However, it is difficult to have the two features coexist natively, particularly in a solution process that flawless film will usually come with smooth morphology. Here, we demonstrate the flawless and surface-nanostructured NiOx film from a simple and controllable room-temperature solution process for achieving high performance flexible PVSCs with good stability and reproducibility. The power conversion efficiency (PCE) can reaches a promising value of 14.53% with no obvious hysteresis (and a high PCE of 17.60% for PVSC on ITO glass). Furthermore, the NiOx-based PVSCs show markedly improved air stability. Regarding the performance improvement, the flawless and surface-nanostructured NiOx film can make the interfacial recombination and monomolecular Shockley-Read-Hall recombination of PVSC reduce. In addition, the formation of an intimate junction of large interfacial area at NiOx film/the perovskite layer improve the hole extraction and thus PVSC performances. This work contributes to the evolution of flexible PVSCs with simple fabrication process and high device performances.

Lipid droplets are dynamic organelles involved in various physiological processes and their detection is thus of high importance to biomedical research. Recent reports show that AIE probes for lipid droplet imaging have the superior advantages of high brightness, large Stokes shift and excellent photostability compared to commercial dyes but suffer from the problem of having a short excitation wavelength. In this work, an AIE probe, namely TPA-BI, was rationally designed and easily prepared from triphenylamine and imidazolone building blocks for the two-photon imaging of lipid droplets. TPA-BI exhibited TICT+AIE features with a large Stokes shift of up to 202 nm and a large two-photon absorption cross-section of up to 213 GM. TPA-BI was more suitable for two-photon imaging of the lipid droplets with the merits of a higher 3D resolution, lesser photobleaching, a reduced autofluorescence and deeper penetration in tissue slices than a commercial probe based on BODIPY 493/503, providing a promising imaging tool for lipid droplet tracking and analysis in biomedical research and clinical diagnosis.