Intrinsic chiroptical responsivity in self-powered organic photodiodes for polarization-tunable optical convolution

Abstract

The intrinsic chiroptical properties of organic semiconductors provide a powerful platform for polarization-encoded optoelectronic signal processing. Here, we develop self-powered chiral organic photodiodes (COPs) based on chiral non-fullerene acceptors blended with achiral polymer donors, in which the circularly polarized light (CPL)-dependent responsivity provides the physical foundation for tunable convolutional weighting. Owing to their polarization-dependent photocurrent, mathematically formulated as the product of the CPL amplitude and a sine function of the retarder rotation angle, these COPs act as bias-free, dynamically reconfigurable convolutional filters capable of robust feature extraction under noisy optical propagation conditions. This materials-driven modulation mechanism enables effective contrast enhancement and noise suppression without external bias or additional circuit elements. When incorporated into an optical convolutional framework, CPL-responsive COPs improve the structural similarity index measure of extracted feature maps from 0.15 to 0.80 and increase handwritten-digit classification accuracy from 76% to 87% compared with natural-light-based counterparts. These results establish chiral organic photodiodes as a promising materials platform for low-power, noise-tolerant optical information processing.