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Organic solar cells (OSCs) in terms of power conversion efficiency (PCE) and operational lifetime have made remarkable progress during the last decade by improving the active layer materials and introducing new interlayers. The newly developed wide bandgap organic donor and low bandgap acceptor molecules covered the absorption from the visible to the near-infrared region. Whereas the incident high energy region (UV) is not in favor of OSCs. Its absorption causes thermalization losses and photoinduced degradation, which hinders the PCE and lifetime of OSCs. Recently, lanthanide and non-lanthanide-based down-conversion (DC) materials have been introduced, which can effectively convert the high-energy photons (UV) to low-energy photons (visible) and resolve the spectral mismatch losses that limit the absorption of OSCs in high energy incident spectrum. Furthermore, the DC materials also protect the OSCs from UV-induced degradation. The DC materials were also proposed to cross the Shockley-Queisser efficiency limit of the solar cell. In this review, the need for DC materials and their processing method for OSCs have been thoroughly discussed. However, the main emphasis has been given to developing lanthanides and non-lanthanides-based DC materials for OSCs, their applications, and their impact on photovoltaic device performance, stability, and future perspectives.

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The intergovernmental panel on climate change has warned about the global temperature that will rise by 4 to 5.8 °C by the end of the century; carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) too will to increase up to 1099 ppm by 2100s. [2] All this will severely impact the environment in terms of melting glaciers, rising sea levels, global warming, etc. This has led the research focus on renewable energy alternative sources such as, solar energy, wind energy, geothermal, etc., in which solar energy is an abundant and attractive for photovoltaic (PV) application. In PV, silicon (polycrystalline, monocrystalline, and amorphous), copper indium gallium (di) selenide (CIGS), gallium arsenide (GaAs), and cadmium telluride (CdTe), heterojunction with intrinsic thinlayer based PV technologies are being used worldwide in which silicon-waferbased solar cells account for about 94% of the total production. [3][4][5][6][7] However, the high cost of inorganic photovoltaic has prevented these technologies from having a significant impact on global energy production. The main disadvantage of these solar cell technologies is the high purity environment needed for device handling and processing. [8,9] The energy and cost required for the material processing and device fabrication are comparatively high, which limits its effectiveness as an alternate energy source. The perovskite solar cells (PSCs) and dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) are also being studied as potential alternatives. [10,11] DSSCs could be

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