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Charge transfer via deep hole in the J51/N2200 blend

In recently developed non-fullerene acceptor (NFA) based organic solar cells (OSCs), both the donor and acceptor parts can be excited by absorbing light photons. Therefore, both electron transfer and hole transfer channels could occur at the donor/acceptor interface for generating free charge carriers in NFA based OSCs. However, in many molecular and DNA systems, recent studies revealed the high charge transfer (CT) efficiency cannot be reasonably explained by a CT model with only highest occupied molecular orbitals (HOMOs) and lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals (LUMOs) of donor and acceptor molecules. In this work, taking an example of a full-polymer blend consisting of benzodithiophenealt-benzotriazole copolymers (J51) as donor and naphthalene diimide-bithiophene (N2200) as acceptor, in which the ultrafast hole transfer has been recently reported, we investigate its CT process and examine the different roles of various frontier molecular orbitals. Through a joint study of quantum mechanics electronic structure calculation and nonadiabatic dynamics simulation, we find the hole transfer between HOMOs of J51 and N2200 can hardly happen but the hole transfer from HOMO of N2200 to HOMO-1 of J51 is much more efficient. This points out the underlying importance of deep hole channel in CT process and indicates that including frontier molecular orbitals (FMOs) other than HOMOs and LUMOs is highly necessary to build a robust physical model for studying CT process in molecular optoelectronic materials.