Strong light-matter coupling for reduced photon energy losses in organic photovoltaics
Date
16/08/2019Author
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Abstract
Strong light-matter coupling can re-arrange the exciton energies in organic semiconductors. Here, we exploit strong coupling by embedding a fullerene-free organic solar cell (OSC) photo-active layer into an optical microcavity, leading to the formation of polariton peaks and a red-shift of the optical gap. At the same time, the open-circuit voltage of the device remains unaffected. This leads to reduced photon energy losses for the low-energy polaritons and a steepening of the absorption edge. While strong coupling reduces the optical gap, the energy of the charge-transfer state is not affected for large driving force donor-acceptor systems. Interestingly, this implies that strong coupling can be exploited in OSCs to reduce the driving force for electron transfer, without chemical or microstructural modifications of the photo-active layer. Our work demonstrates that the processes determining voltage losses in OSCs can now be tuned, and reduced to unprecedented values, simply by manipulating the device architecture.
Citation
C. Nikolis , V , Mischok , A , Siegmund , B , Kublitski , J , Jia , X , Benduhn , J , Hörmann , U , Neher , D , Gather , M C , Spoltore , D & Vandewal , K 2019 , ' Strong light-matter coupling for reduced photon energy losses in organic photovoltaics ' , Nature Communications , vol. 10 , 3706 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11717-5
Publication
Nature Communications
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2041-1723Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2019. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visithttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
Funding: Volkswagen Foundation (no.93404) (MCG), individual fellowship of the DeutscheForschungsgemeinschaft (404587082) (AM).Collections
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