Organic/Inorganic Hybrids for Solar Energy Generation

Organic and hybrid (organic/inorganic) solar cells are an attractive alternative to traditional silicon-based photovoltaics due to low-temperature, solution-based processing and the potential for rapid, easily scalable manufacturing. Using oxide semiconductors, instead of fullerenes, as the electron acceptor and transporter in hybrid solar cells has the added advantages of better environmental stability, higher electron mobility, and the ability to engineer interfacial band offsets and hence the photovoltage. Further improvements to this structure can be made by using metal oxide nanostructures to increase heterojunction areas, similar to bulk heterojunction organic photovoltaics. However, compared to all-organic solar cells, these hybrid devices produce far lower photocurrent, making improvement of the photocurrent the highest priority. This points to a less than optimized polymer/metal oxide interface for carrier separation. In this article, we summarize recent work on examining the polymer structure, electron transfer, and recombination at the polythiophene-ZnO interface in hybrid solar cells. Additionally, the impact of chemical modification at the donor-acceptor interface on the device characteristics is reviewed.