Strong light-matter coupling for reduced photon energy losses in organic photovoltaics

Vasileios C. Nikolis (), Andreas Mischok (), Bernhard Siegmund, Jonas Kublitski, Xiangkun Jia, Johannes Benduhn, Ulrich Hörmann, Dieter Neher, Malte C. Gather, Donato Spoltore and Koen Vandewal ()
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Vasileios C. Nikolis: Technische Universität Dresden
Andreas Mischok: University of St. Andrews
Bernhard Siegmund: Technische Universität Dresden
Jonas Kublitski: Technische Universität Dresden
Xiangkun Jia: Technische Universität Dresden
Johannes Benduhn: Technische Universität Dresden
Ulrich Hörmann: University of Potsdam
Dieter Neher: University of Potsdam
Malte C. Gather: University of St. Andrews
Donato Spoltore: Technische Universität Dresden
Koen Vandewal: Technische Universität Dresden

Nature Communications, 2019, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2019
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11717-5

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