Design Principles for Nanoparticle Plasmon-Enhanced Organic Solar Cells

Abstract

Plasmonic metallic nanoparticles are coupled to the organic solar cells to overcome the trade-off between the light absorption and carrier collection. They are usually located inside or outside of the active layers. However, no detailed comparison was reported on the light absorption difference when nanoparticles are located inside or outside of the active layers. In this paper, we compare light-trapping abilities of Ag nanospheres in organic solar cells when they are located inside and outside of the photoactive layer. We show that large-sized nanoparticles are preferred when they are placed outside of the active layer while small-sized nanoparticles are favored in the case of embedding nanoparticles in the homogenous active layer.

Recent process of plasma effect in organic solar cells

“…Metallic nanostructures including NPs, nanotubes, nanoshells, and so on have been widely embedded in active layer of OSCs to extend their wavelength region of light absorption [110][111][112][113][114].…”

Numerical study on the limit of quasi-static approximation for plasmonic nanosphere

“…Plasmonic nanospheres are widely used in different nanophotonic applications including surface-enhanced Raman and infrared spectroscopy [1,2], metal-enhanced fluorescence spectroscopy [3], nanobiosensing [4], super-resolution microscopy [5] and photovoltaics [6]. The ease tuning of the plasmon mode of such nanospheres into intended spectral regime by controlling their sizes, makes their application popular in near-field optics [7,8].…”

Investigation of Non-ideality Factors for a P3HT: PCBM Based Bulk Heterojunction Organic Solar Cell in Presence of Silver Nanoparticles

“…These are strongly confined to the interface and decay on increasing distance from the interface. SPPs excited in the metal/semiconductor interface can effectively guide or trap the light in the semiconductor layer [12,15]. This mechanism is extremely useful for materials that have smaller carrier diffusion lengths and absorption rates greater than the inverse of the plasmon decay time (10-50 fs) which is the case of organic or direct bandgap semiconductors.…”