Microcavity is an efficient approach to manufacture colorful semitransparent organic solar cells (ST-OSCs) with high color purity by tailoring the transmission spectrum to narrow peaks. However, in this type of colorful semitransparent devices, high power conversion efficiency (PCE) and high peak transmittance are not yet simultaneously achieved. This paper proposes a new type of microcavity structure to achieve colorful ST-OSCs with both high PCE and high peak transmittance, in which a hybrid Au/Ag electrode is used as a mirror and WO3 is used as a spacer layer. First, it is demonstrated that the hybrid Au/Ag electrode mirror brings about an improvement of 7.7 and 5.5% for PCE and peak transmittance, respectively, when compared with those of the reference devices using the Ag electrode mirror. Specifically, the PCE of the optimized devices reaches the satisfactory value of over 9%, and the peak transmittance is over 25%. This value of PCE is the highest one reported so far for the microcavity-based ST-OSCs with the same peak transmittance. Second, it is demonstrated that the second-order resonance of the microcavity can be used to improve the color purity of green ST-OSCs by narrowing the transmission peak, and the combination of the second-order and third-order resonance can be used to construct colorful ST-OSCs with mixed colors. Thus, a novel approach is developed to tune the color of ST-OSCs, which is based on high-order resonance modes of the microcavity.
Keywords: color mixing; color tunability; efficiency; hybrid Au/Ag electrode; interface optimization; microcavity; semitransparent organic solar cells; transparency.