On the Possibility of Singlet Fission in Crystalline Quaterrylene

Singlet Fission (SF), the spontaneous down-conversion of a singlet exciton into two triplet excitons residing on neighboring molecules, is a promising route to improving organic photovoltaic (OPV) device efficiencies by harvesting two charge carriers from one photon. However, only a few materials have been discovered that exhibit SF, most of which are acene derivatives. Recently, there has been a growing interest in the rylene family of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) as potential SF materials. We use many-body perturbation theory in the GW approximation and the Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) to investigate the possibility of SF in crystalline quaterrylene. A new method is presented for determining the percent charge transfer character (%CT) of an exciton wave-function from double-Bader analysis. This enables relating exciton probability distributions to crystal packing. Based on comparison to known and predicted SF materials with respect to the energy conservation criterion (E_S-2E_T) and %CT, crystalline quaterrylene is a promising candidate for SF. Furthermore, quaterrylene is attractive for OPV applications thanks to its high stability, narrow optical gap, and lowest lying triplet excitation energy in the optimal range to maximize solar conversion efficiency.