Building Supramolecular Chirality in Organic Solar Cells Enables High-Performing Circularly Polarized Light Detection

Abstract High-performing direct circularly polarized light (CPL) detectors are urgently needed for the development of chiral optoelectronics. We herein report the direct CPL detectors based on chiral organic small-molecule donor–fullerene acceptor bulk heterojunction organic solar cells (OSCs). By building supramolecular chirality in active layer of OSCs, the chiral OSC demonstrates its highest short-circuit current dissymmetry factor of 0.17 among state-of-the-art direct CPL detectors possessing intrinsic chirality. It demonstrates a significant difference in responsivity of 40 mA W− 1 upon opposite CPL illumination, four times higher than that of the best reported chiral perovskite CPL detectors to date. The association between the device metrics crucially relating to CPL detection and the anisotropic factor (g-factor) of the active layers revealed that supramolecular chirality is vital to the CPL detectability of OSCs. Given unique but ubiquitous observed supramolecular chirality induction and transfer in organic conjugated systems, highly sensitive CPL detectors based on chiral OSCs show great potential for promoting the development of practical direct CPL detection.