The effects of Au nanoparticles (NPs) incorporated into the active layer of polymer solar cells (PSCs) with a newly synthesized donor polymer are investigated in detail. Our work shows that localized surface plasmonic resonance (LSPR) introduced by the metallic NPs can experimentally and theoretically enhance the light absorption in the active layer of PSCs because the strong LSPR near field mainly distributes laterally along the active layer. The understanding can be applied to other metallic NPs incorporated organic solar cells. Meanwhile, our results show that electrical properties can counter-diminish the optical enhancement from LSPR and thus reduces the overall performance improvement. It is important that both optical and electrical properties need to be studied and optimized simultaneously for achieving improved power conversion efficiency. The study contributes to better understanding on the uses of Au NPs for enhancing PSC performances.

We demonstrate efficiency improvement in polymer solar cells (PSCs) by $22% through incorporating Au nanoparticles (NPs) into all polymer layers. Au NPs are found to have distinct mechanisms in improving device performance when incorporated in different polymer layers. Au NPs in poly-(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrenesulfonate) mainly contribute to better hole collection while Au NPs in active layer contributes to the enhanced optical absorption and more balanced charge-transport. Our theoretical result shows that the absorption enhancement at the active layer is attributed to plasmon resonances with strong near-field distributions penetrated into absorption polymers. These findings can be applied to design high-efficiency metallic NPs-incorporated PSCs. V

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