Recent advances in molecular organic photovoltaics (OPVs) have shown 10% power conversion efficiency (PCE) for single-junction cells, which put them in direct competition with PVs based on amorphous silicon. Incorporation of plasmonic nanostructures for light trapping in these thin-film devices offers an attractive solution to realize higher-efficiency OPVs with PCE>>10%. This article reviews recent progress on plasmonic-enhanced OPV devices using metallic nanoparticles, and one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) patterned periodic nanostructures. We discuss the benefits of using various plasmonic nanostructures for broad-band, polarization-insensitive and angle-independent absorption enhancement, and their integration with one or two electrode(s) of an OPV device.

Plasmonic color filters employing a single optically-thick nanostructured metal layer have recently generated considerable interest as an alternative to colorant-based color filtering technologies, due to their reliability, ease of fabrication, and high color tunability. However, their relatively low transmission efficiency (~30%) needs to be significantly improved for practical applications. The present work reports, for the first time, a novel plasmonic subtractive color filtering scheme that exploits the counter-intuitive phenomenon of extraordinary low transmission (ELT) through an ultrathin nanostructured metal film. This approach relies on a fundamentally different color filtering mechanism than that of existing plasmonic additive color filters, and achieves unusually high transmission efficiencies of 60 ~ 70% for simple architectures. Furthermore, owing to short-range interactions of surface plasmon polaritons at ELT resonances, our design offers high spatial resolution color filtering with compact pixel size close to the optical diffraction limit (~λ/2), creating solid applications ranging from imaging sensors to color displays.

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