Influence of particle size in hybrid solar cells composed of CdSe nanocrystals and poly(3-hexylthiophene)

Abstract

Inorganic semiconductor nanoparticles, such as CdSe quantum dots, are considered to be a promising alternative to fullerene derivates for application as electron acceptors in polymer-based bulk heterojunction solar cells. The main potential advantage is the strong light absorption of CdSe nanoparticles with a spectral bandwidth, which can even be tuned, due to the quantum size effect. However, the impact of the particle size on the performance of polymer/CdSe solar cells has remained largely unexplored so far. Therefore, the influence of particle size in hybrid solar cells using a blend of poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and quasi-spherical CdSe nanoparticles on relevant cell parameters and the overall solar cell performance is systematically studied in the present work. As the most important result, an increase of the open-circuit voltage (VOC) can be found for smaller nanoparticles and can be explained by an “effective bandgap” model. In contrast, no significant changes of the short-circuit current density with particle size are observed. Smaller particles were found to yield a lower fill factor, compensating the gain in VOC, so that the power conversion efficiency finally turned out to be independent of the particle size in this study. Spectral differences observed in the respective external quantum efficiency spectra of the solar cells can be attributed to size-dependent changes of the particle absorption. Temperature-dependent measurements of the current-voltage (I-V) characteristics suggest that the transport of photogenerated charge carriers in the bulk heterojunction is limited by localized states, with activation energy beyond thermal energy at room temperature.