Exciton trapping at heterojunctions in polymer blends

Optoelectronic devices made from semiconductor polymers often employ partially phase-separated binary polymer blends with "distributed heterojunctions" in the polymer film, and the migration of bulk excitons towards these heterojunctions crucially influences the device performance. Here, we investigate exciton migration in blend films of two polyfluorene derivatives. Localized exciplex states form in electron-hole capture at the heterojunction between the two polymers and these can be thermally excited to transfer to bulk excitons. Rapid radiative emission from these excitons can then allow efficient light-emitting diode operation. We show here that when these excitons migrate to another heterojunction site within their lifetime they are re-trapped at the interface and again form exciplex states or dissociate completely. We demonstrate that in polymer blend light-emitting diodes this can reduce the exciton population by more than 54% and can strongly influence the emission spectrum. We then analyze exciton re-trapping in detail using time-resolved photoluminescence spectroscopy on blends with different morphologies and find that for nanometer-scale phases exciton emission is completely suppressed. We show that the data agree well with a simple kinetic model which confirms the importance of the blend morphology for the exciton trapping efficiency.