Black Phosphorus Quantum Dots Used for Boosting Light Harvesting in Organic Photovoltaics

Shenghua Liu; Shenghuang Lin; Peng You; Charles Surya; Shu Ping Lau; Feng Yan

doi:10.1002/anie.201707510

Black Phosphorus Quantum Dots Used for Boosting Light Harvesting in Organic Photovoltaics

Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 2017 Oct 23;56(44):13717-13721. doi: 10.1002/anie.201707510. Epub 2017 Sep 22.

Authors

Shenghua Liu¹, Shenghuang Lin¹, Peng You¹, Charles Surya², Shu Ping Lau¹, Feng Yan¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Applied Physics, The Hong kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.
² Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, The Hong kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China.

PMID: 28892229
DOI: 10.1002/anie.201707510

Abstract

Although organic photovoltaic devices (OPVs) have been investigated for more than two decades, the power conversion efficiencies of OPVs are much lower than those of inorganic or perovskite solar cells. One effective approach to improve the efficiency of OPVs is to introduce additives to enhance light harvesting as well as charge transportation in the devices. Here, black phosphorus quantum dots (BPQDs) are introduced in OPVs as an additive. By adding 0.055 wt % BPQDs relative to the polymer donors in the OPVs, the device efficiencies can be dramatically improved for more than 10 %. The weight percentage is much lower than that of any other additive used in OPVs before, which is mainly due to the two-dimentional structure as well as the strong broadband light absorption and scattering of the BPQDs. This work paves a way for using two-dimentional quantum dots in OPVs as a cost-effective approach to enhance device efficiencies.

Keywords: black phosphorus; light harvesting; organic photovoltaics; quantum dots; solar cells.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't