Highly-Efficient Plasmon-Enhanced Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells Created by Means of Dry Plasma Reduction

Plasmon-assisted energy conversion is investigated in a comparative study of dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) equipped with photo-anodes, which are fabricated by forming gold (Au) and silver (Ag) nanoparticles (NPs) on an fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) glass surface by means of dry plasma reduction (DPR) and coating TiO2 paste onto the modified FTO glass through a screen printing method. As a result, the FTO/Ag-NPs/TiO2 photo-anode showed an enhancement of its photocurrent, whereas the FTO/Au-NPs/TiO2 photo-anode showed less photocurrent than even a standard photo-anode fabricated by simply coating TiO2 paste onto the modified FTO glass through screen printing. This result stems from the small size and high areal number density of Au-NPs on FTO glass, which prevent the incident light from reaching the TiO2 layer.