Design of Transparent Anodes for Resonant Cavity Enhanced Light Harvesting in Organic Solar Cells

• DOI: 10.1002/adma.201104273
• Publication Date: 2012-01-03T11:56:01Z
• Authors: Nicholas P. Sergeant; Afshin Hadipour; Bjoern Niesen; David Cheyns; Paul Heremans; Peter Peumans; Barry P. Rand
• Keywords: Molybdenum; Silver; Light; photonics; organic solar cells; Oxides; 02 engineering and technology; Kinetics; Electric Power Supplies; Solar Energy; silver; light-trapping; Organic Chemicals; Volatilization; 0210 nano-technology; transparent conductors; Electrodes

The use of an ITO-free MoO 3/Ag/MoO 3 anode to control the photon harvesting in PCDTBT:PC 70BM solar cells is proposed. At first sight, the fact that these anodes possess reduced far-field transmission compared to ITO may seem to be a disadvantage. But, despite this, we show that by carefully tuning the resonant optical cavity we can enhance the external quantum efficiency close to the band edge of PCDTBT, resulting in high photocurrent and power conversion efficiency on par with ITO. Copyright © 2012 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim. ; We would like to thank St Jean Photochemicals (Montreal, CA, USA) for providing the PCDTBT polymer. This publication was partially based on work supported by the Center for Advanced Molecular Photovoltaics (CAMP) (Award No KUS-C1-015-21), made by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). The authors thank Prof. M.D. McGehee, Dr. P. Catrysse and Prof. S. Fan for insightful discussions. N.P.S. acknowledges the financial support as a Francqui fellow of the Belgian American Educational Foundation.