Plasmonic metal-dielectric core-shell nanoparticles for enhanced power conversion efficiency of organic solar cells

Abstract

The current photovoltaic module market is dominated by silicon solar cells, whose development is limited by high costs of manufacturing processes. The search for easy low temperature fabrication techniques has spurred the development of solar cells based on organic semiconductor polymers. Recent studies have reported polymer based solar cells with comparable power conversion efficiencies to those of commercially available silicon solar cell modules. In the face of these advances, higher efficiencies are still desirable to better utilize the available solar energy for power generation. Organic semiconducting polymers have a high coefficient of absorption, but short carrier path lengths which necessitates the fabrication of thin layers for optimal power generation. The introduction of plasmonic effects in these organic solar cells leads to an increase in the optical path length of the incident light in the active layer, thereby increasing the short circuit current density. In this work, an organic solar cell is presented which contains metal-dielectric core-shell plasmonic nanoparticles. Finite difference time domain (FDTD) modelling has been used to simulate the models of light interaction with the organic solar cells containing different metal@dielectric nanoparticle composites. The different parameters of the nanoparticle composites in the organic solar cells were varied to the study the absorption enhancement in the active layer medium. The results, thus obtained for enhanced performance, were used for the chemical synthesis of the metal@dielectric nanoparticle composites and fabrication of organic solar cells with high power conversion efficiency.