High Performance Ultrathin MoO₃/Ag Transparent Electrode and Its Application in Semitransparent Organic Solar Cells.

Linlin Shi,Yanxia Cui,Wenyan Wang,Yupeng Gao,Furong Zhu,Ye Zhang,Yuying Hao

doi:10.3390/nano8070473

Linlin Shi, Yanxia Cui + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/nano8070473

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Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate high performance ultrathin silver (Ag) transparent electrodes with a thin MoO3 nucleation layer based on the thermal evaporation method. The MoO3/Ag transparent electrodes fabricated at different deposition rates were compared systematically on aspects of the transmission spectrum, surface resistance, and surface morphology. Our study indicates that with the presence of the MoO3 nucleation layer, an Ag film of only 7 nm thick can achieve percolation and the film is porous instead of forming isolated islands. In addition, the increase of the deposition rate can yield obvious improvement of the surface morphology of the Ag film. Specifically, with the help of a 1 nm thick MoO3 nucleation layer, the Ag film of 9 nm thick realized under the deposition rate of 0.7 nm/s has a surface resistance of about 20 ohm/sq and an average transmittance in the visible light range reaching 74.22%. Such a high performance of transmittance is superior to the reported results in the literature, which inevitably suffer obvious drop in the long wavelength range. Next, we applied the ultrathin MoO3/Ag transparent electrode in organic solar cells. The optimized semitransparent organic solar cell displays a power conversion efficiency of 2.76% and an average transmittance in the visible range of 38% when light is incident from the Ag electrode side.

Highlights

Organic solar cells (OSCs), showing advantages in terms of rich material resources, light weight, good compatibility with roll-to-roll and large area fabrications, colorfulness, etc., have become a very hot research topic in the field of solar energy utilization [1]
We systematically studied the effect of the deposition rate of Ag on the performances of ultrathin MoO3/Ag transparent electrodes based on the thermal evaporation method
It was found that the Ag film fabricated on top of the glass substrate shows minor improvement on film growth with the increase of deposition rate

Summary

Introduction

Organic solar cells (OSCs), showing advantages in terms of rich material resources, light weight, good compatibility with roll-to-roll and large area fabrications, colorfulness, etc., have become a very hot research topic in the field of solar energy utilization [1]. Different materials have been proposed to replace ITO as transparent electrodes, e.g., highly conductive polymers (e.g., Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene): poly(styrenesulfonate), shorted as PEDOT:PSS) [3], metal nanostructures [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12], graphene [13,14], carbon nanotubes [15], etc. Among these conductive materials, noble metals including silver (Ag) and gold (Au), which have high conductivity and are inert from oxidation, have been frequently used to make transparent electrodes. Ag based transparent electrodes have attracted intensive attention in the field of optoelectronics [16,17,18]

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