Quantifying Bimolecular Recombination Losses in Organic Bulk Heterojunction Solar Cells

摘要

The amount of energy that the Earth receives from the Sun is enormous and dwarfs all non-renewable resources. Recent developments of solar cells prepared from blends of conjugated polymers and fullerene derivatives have lead to significant steps forward in device efficiency, with the current record at 7.4% efficiency. To enable a further improvement of organic solar cell efficiency a clear and thorough understanding of the fundamental processes that occur in organic solar cells is a necessity. One of the processes limiting the efficiency of organic solar cells is bimolecular recombination of photogenerated charge carriers and in the quest for new high-performance materials it is important to establish just how many carriers are lost through this process.