Towards All Carbon Solar Cells

Herein we describe our work toward an efficient solar cell made in its entirety with carbon based materials. The different arrangements and combinations in which carbon can exist produce a wide variety of compounds that have unique physical, chemical and electrical properties. Some of these allotropes behave as conductors while others are classified as semiconducting. Our efforts focus on taking advantage of the carbon based materials’ potential and optimally employ them together to form an all carbon solar cell. We first briefly discuss our recent publication on a first demonstration of an all carbon solar cell employing single walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) in conjunction with fullerenes as the active junction, and single walled carbon nanotubes and graphene oxide as the electrodes. We will then report on ongoing work towards engineering a much more efficient solar cell which include optimizing material processing specifically the sorting of semiconducting SWNTs of various diameters as well as moving towards the formation of an interpenetrating bulk heterojunction of the donor and acceptor layers. We will also report on our work regarding the careful controlling of the doping of the graphitic electrodes via a range of techniques to enable efficient extraction of both hole and electrons in a solar cell.