Abstract
Organic solar cells hold great promise for next-generation photovoltaics, yet their practical deployment is impeded by intrinsic morphological and interfacial limitations that compromise device performance and stability. Herein, we introduce a vacuum-induced interfacial compaction strategy that forms smooth, compact, and strongly adhered multilayer films without conventional thermal or solvent annealing, by promoting dense stacking, suppressing interfacial voids, and improving overall interfacial integrity. Consequently, corresponding devices achieve power conversion efficiencies of 20.51% for rigid and 19.13% for flexible devices, together with a high yield. Notably, device with an active area of 1.0 cm2 and a module with an area of 15.7 cm2 fabricated with this strategy deliver efficiencies of 19.04% and 17.48%, respectively. Upon further scaling the module area to 67.2 cm2, a high efficiency of 15.37% is still attained. These results establish the vacuum-induced interfacial compaction strategy as a feasible route toward durable, high-performance organic solar cells.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the financial support from the NSFC (52450063 to H.H., 52120105006 to H.H., 52522314 to Y.C., and 52473200 to Y.C.), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (E4ER1801 to H.H. and E3ET1803 to H.H.), and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB 0520103 to H.H.).
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H.H., Y.C., and S.W. developed the concept and conceived the idea. H.H. and Y.C. supervised and directed this project. S.W., R.D., and J.W. participated in the optimization of device fabrication. S.W. and Z.Z. prepared samples for characterization analysis. S.W., R.D., and Z.Z. analyzed and processed data. S.W. and R.D. wrote the manuscript, and H.H. and Y.C. contributed to revisions of the manuscript. Z.X. and Y.L. conducted the TAS measurements and data analysis. Z.T. and J.W. conducted the energy loss measurements and data analysis. J.Z. carried out the GIWAXS measurements. Y.Z. contributed to the TOF-SIMS measurements. All the authors participated in the data analysis and commented on the manuscript.
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Wang, S., Ding, R., Zhang, Z. et al. Vacuum-induced interfacial compaction for scalable fabrication of high-performance organic solar cells. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70579-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70579-w
