Effect of the crystallinity of silver nanoparticles on surface plasmon resonance induced enhancement of effective absorption cross-section of dyes

Abstract

The effective absorption cross-section of dye, and therefore, the efficiency of dye-sensitized solar cell can be increased by surface plasmon resonance (SPR) of metal nanoparticles with enhanced dephasing time. Further, the dephasing time is proportional to the enhancement factor of electric field in the vicinity of nanoparticle surface, and is governed by size, shape, and dielectric constant of surrounding medium. In this paper, we demonstrate that crystallinity of silver nanoparticles plays an important role in enhancing the dephasing time of SPR. Our theoretical formulation indicates that the dephasing time is higher for single crystalline silver nanoparticles as compared to that of polycrystalline nanoparticles, which is attributed to the presence of scattering centers in the latter. This suggests that single crystalline silver nanoparticles are interesting candidates for the enhancement of effective absorption cross-section of dyes. In order to validate our theoretical formulation, we have synthesized single crystalline and polycrystalline silver nanoparticles and studied their effect on absorption cross-section of N719 dye. We observed that dye incorporated with single crystalline silver nanoparticles showed a significant enhancement as compared to polycrystalline silver nanoparticles (24.42% in solution, 21.01% in thin film form in single crystalline silver nanoparticles while 8.52% in solution, 7.97% in thin film form in polycrystalline silver nanoparticles, respectively).