title: Optical and electrical effects of plasmonic nanoparticles in high-efficiency hybrid solar cells.
abstract: Plasmonics have been proven to be an effective way to harness more incident light to achieve high efficiency in photovoltaic devices. Herein, we explore the possibility that plasmonics can be utilized to enhance light trapping and power conversion efficiency (PCE) for polymer-quantum dot (QD) hybrid solar cells (HSCs). Based on a low band-gap polymer poly[2,6-(4,4-bis-(2-ethylhexyl)-4H-cyclopenta[2,1-b;3,4-b']-dithiophene)-alt-4,7-(2,1,3-benzothiadiazole)] (PCPDTBT) and a CdSe QD bulk-heterojunction (BHJ) system, gold nanoparticles were doped at different locations of the devices. Successfully, an improved PCE of 3.20 ± 0.22% and 3.16 ± 0.15% was achieved by doping the hole transporting layer and the active layer, respectively, which are among the highest values reported for CdSe QD based HSCs. A detailed study of processing, characterization, microscopy, and device fabrication is conducted to understand the underlying mechanism for the enhanced device performance. The success of this work provides a simple and generally applicable approach to enhance light harnessing of polymer-QD hybrid solar cells.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Silicon Materials, MOE Key Laboratory of Macromolecular Synthesis and Functionalization, & Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, P. R. China. hzchen@zju.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Wei-Fei
authors.initials: WF
authors.lastname: Fu
authors.forename: Xiaoqiang
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Xi
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.forename: Ling
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Ye
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.forename: Minmin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.forename: Han-Ying
authors.initials: HY
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Alex K-Y
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Jen
authors.forename: Jun-Wu
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Yong
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Cao
authors.forename: Hong-Zheng
authors.initials: HZ
authors.lastname: Chen