Understanding the fundamental chemistry of conjugated polymers and fullerenes has been the subject of intense research for the last three decades, with the last ten years seeing increased research toward the application of these materials into functional organic electronic devices such as organic photovoltaic devices (OPVs). This field has seen significant advances is cell efficiency in just the last few years (to >10%), in large part due to the development of new donor and acceptor materials, the fine tuning of fabrication parameters to control material nanostructure, as well as the introduction of new interfacial materials such as ionically functionalized conjugated polymers, also known as conjugated polyelectrolytes (CPEs). This dissertation aims to further understand the fundamental chemistry associated with charge injection processes in CPEs and ionically functionalized fullerenes. The role of ionic functionality on electrochemical, chemical, and interfacial charge injection processes is explored. The results presented demonstrate the use of ionic functionality to control the spatial doping profile of a bilayer structure of anionically and cationically functionalized CPEs to fabricate a p-n junction (Chapter II). The role of ionic functionality on chemical charge injection processes is explored via the reaction of polyacetylene and polythiophene based CPEs with molecular oxygen (Chapters III and IV). The results show the dramatic effect of ionic functionality, as well as the specific role of the counterion, on the photooxidative stability of CPEs. The control of reaction pathway via counterion charge density is also explored (Chapter IV) and shows a continuum of reaction pathways based on the charge density of the counter cation. Finally, the role of ionic functionality on interfacial charge injection processes in a functional OPV is explored using a cationically functionalized fullerene derivative (Chapters V and VI). Cell performance increases due to an increase in open-circuit voltage and substantial reduction in series resistance resulting from the high conductivity of the interfacial fullerene layer. The chemical origin of this high conductivity is explored in Chapter VI and shown to likely be the result of chemical reactions occurring between the counter anion and the fullerene core. This dissertation contains coauthored, previously published and unpublished work.

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