High performance organic devices including polymer solar cells (PSCs) and light emitting diodes (PLEDs) were successfully demonstrated with the presence of highly ordered nanoimprinted Au nanodisks (Au NDs) in their solution-processed active/emissive layers, respectively. PSCs and PLEDs were fabricated using a low bandgap polymer and acceptor, nitrogen doped multiwalled carbon nanotubes poly[4,...

Fundamentally, organic solar cells (OSCs) with a bulk-heterojunction active layer are made of at least two electronically dissimilar molecules, in which photoabsorption one (donor) generates Frenkel excitons. The formation free charge carriers emerge after exciton dissociation the donor:acceptor interface. In past decade, most progress enhanced device performance has been steered by rapid devel...

Organic solar cells (OSCs) recently achieved efficiencies of over 18% and are well on their way to practical applications, but still considerable stability issues need be overcome. One major problem emerges from the electron transport material zinc oxide (ZnO), which is mainly used in inverted device architecture decomposes many high-performance nonfullerene acceptors due its photocatalytic act...

In the past three years, our research project sponsored partially by AFOSR has been focused on developing low bandgap semiconducting polymers as both the donor and acceptor materials for BHJ solar cells. Research effort were also devoted to establish structure-property relationship and develop approaches to optimize light harvest, charge separation and charge collection, thus the overall power ...

Squaraine dyes are considered an important group of photoactive materials in the field of organic photovoltaic devices. In this work, we purposely tuned the side chains and number of hydroxyl (OH) groups in a series of squaraine (SQ) dyes, i.e., SQ1−4, to investigate the effect of structural variations on the material properties as well as the performance of these dyes as donor materials in bul...

To achieve densely packed charge-selective organosilane-based interfacial layers (IFLs) on the tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) anodes of organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells, a series of Ar2N-(CH2)n-SiCl3 precursors with Ar = 3,4-difluorophenyl, n = 3, 6, 10, and 18, was synthesized, characterized, and chemisorbed on OPV anodes to serve as IFLs. To minimize lateral nonbonded -NAr2···Ar2N- repulsions w...

Although polymer solar cells (PSCs) have received a tremendous amount of attention in recent years, a number of criteria must be met in order for them to be suitable as practical and commercially feasible power sources, including high performance, good air stability and inexpensive manufacturing. In this contribution, we determine the optimal top electrode for practical PSC fabrication by inves...

Self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) based on Br-2PACz ([2-(3,6-dibromo-9H-carbazol-9-yl)ethyl]phosphonic acid) 2PACz ([2-(9H-Carbazol-9-yl)ethyl]phosphonic and MeO-2PACz ([2-(3,6-dimethoxy-9H-carbazol-9-yl)ethyl]phosphonic molecules were investigated as hole-extracting interlayers in organic photovoltaics (OPVs). The highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) energies of these SAMs measured at −6.0...

INTRODUCTION In recent years, polymer solar cells (PSCs) have attracted great attention due to the energy crisis all over the world. Compared with inorganic solar cells, PSCs have many advantages, such as light weight, solution processability, mechanical flexibility and low cost.1 The stateof-the-art of PSCs are based on a fullerene-derivative acceptor, such as [6,6]-phenyl-C61-butyric acid met...