The achievement of large-area, aligned, polymer-semiconductor nanohybrid layers remains a challenge in the fabrication of ordered heterojunction photovoltaics. Bottom-up synthesis and liquid-phase processing are both promising and economical solutions to this end. The solution-based synthesis of inorganic oxide-conjugated polymer core-shell nanocomposites has been studied in the context of creating individual, basic photovoltaic elements. In order to achieve the desired OBHJ motif, which has already been a subject of much interest, one can imagine that the individual composite structures can be arrayed vertically with their long axes perpendicular to the planes of the electrodes. By directly controlling the morphology of the nanocomposite elements, the density of donor-acceptor interfaces may be controlled to match the carrier diffusion limit of the transport-limiting polymer donor material, and direct conduction paths from the bulk of the active layer to the eletrodes can be ensured, thus greatly improving the efficiency of these polymer-inorganic semiconductor photovoltaics over traditional bulk heterojunction hybrid PVs. Here, the utility of scalable, volume-independent magnetic field to force self-assembly of Co-doped ZnO nanowire-polythiophene nanocomposites in the bulk is demonstrated towards the achievement of OBHJ photovoltaic active layers.
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