Experimental Studies of Plasmonic Nanoparticle Effects on Organic Solar Cells - Organic Solar Cells: Materials and Device Physics - page 209

Chapter 8
Experimental Studies of Plasmonic
Nanoparticle Effects on Organic
Solar Cells

Dixon D. S. Fung and Wallace C. H. Choy

Abstract The incorporation of plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) into different layers
of organic solar cells (OSCs) is studied in this chapter. First, we incorporate NPs
into the hole collection layer of OSCs. The resulting improvements in Power
Conversion Efficiency (PCE) are found to originate mainly from improvement in
hole collection efficiency, while Localized Surface Plasmon Resonance (LSPR)
effects are found to have negligible effect on active layer absorption. Next, we
incorporate NPs into the active layer of OSCs. In this case, the absorption of the
active layer improves, but we also showed that consideration of electrical prop-
erties including carrier mobility, exciton dissociation efficiency, and active layer
morphology is required to account for the PCE trend. In both studies, we theo-
retically show that the very strong near field of NPs is found to distribute laterally
along the layer in which the NPs are incorporated in, and hence leading to active
layer absorption improvements only when NPs are incorporated into the active
layer. Lastly, we incorporated NPs into both active layer and hole collection layer
in which the accumulated effects of NPs in the different layers achieved *22 %
improvement in PCE as compared to the optimized control OSCs using poly
(3-hexylthiophene): phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (P3HT:PCBM) as the
active layer.