Photoconductive Cathode Interlayer for Highly Efficient Inverted Polymer Solar Cells

Li Nian; Wenqiang Zhang; Na Zhu; Linlin Liu; Zengqi Xie; Hongbin Wu; Frank Würthner; Yuguang Ma

doi:10.1021/jacs.5b02168

Photoconductive Cathode Interlayer for Highly Efficient Inverted Polymer Solar Cells

J Am Chem Soc. 2015 Jun 10;137(22):6995-8. doi: 10.1021/jacs.5b02168. Epub 2015 Jun 1.

Authors

Li Nian¹, Wenqiang Zhang¹, Na Zhu¹, Linlin Liu¹, Zengqi Xie¹, Hongbin Wu¹, Frank Würthner, Yuguang Ma¹

Affiliation

¹ †Institute of Polymer Optoelectronic Materials and Devices, State Key Laboratory of Luminescent Materials and Devices, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510640, China.

PMID: 26016386
DOI: 10.1021/jacs.5b02168

Abstract

A highly photoconductive cathode interlayer was achieved by doping a 1 wt % light absorber, such as perylene bisimide, into a ZnO thin film, which absorbs a very small amount of light but shows highly increased conductivity of 4.50 × 10(-3) S/m under sunlight. Photovoltaic devices based on this kind of photoactive cathode interlayer exhibit significantly improved device performance, which is rather insensitive to the thickness of the cathode interlayer over a broad range. Moreover, a power conversion efficiency as high as 10.5% was obtained by incorporation of our photoconductive cathode interlayer with the PTB7-Th:PC71BM active layer, which is one of the best results for single-junction polymer solar cells.