BODIPY (meso-phenyl-meso) dimer as a photovoltaic material

Derivatives of boron-dipyrromethene (BODIPY) constitute an important class of chromophores. The BODIPY dyes can be applied in an extensive variety of applications, such as cellular imaging, photodynamic therapy, drug-delivery or organic photovoltaics. BODIPYs are also excellent compounds to be applied as electron-donor materials in organic photovoltaic cells as they have a strong absorption in the visible spectra region, a photochemical and chemical stability, good solubility and a general suitable HOMO/LUMO frontier orbital energy levels.

Following our own work on the use of BODIPYs as photovoltaic materials, in this communication we present the synthesis and characterization of a meso-meso BODIPY dimer. This BODIPY dimer has all the main properties to work efficiently as electron-donor material since it exhibits strong absorbance in the visible spectrum, good solubility and suitable HOMO and LUMO energy orbitals to work as donor material in the bulky heterojunction BODIPY/PCBM layer, based solar cells.