Invited Paper EM+2D+AN+MI+MP+NS-TuA1
Plasmonic Metasurface Electrodes for Excitonic Solar Cells.

Tuesday, October 23, 2018, 2:20 pm, Room 101A

Excitonic organic solar cell technologies, while not currently competitive with inorganic-semiconductor analogues, can exhibit very small device embodied energies (due to comparatively low temperature and low energy-use fabrication processes), which is of interest for minimizing overall device cost and energy-payback time. To improve energy conversion efficiency in thin-film excitonic organic solar cells, light management using nanophotonic structures is necessary. Here, our recent work on improving light trapping in deeply-subwavelength excitonic organic semiconductor films using plasmonic metasurfaces will be presented. Numerous exciton-metasurface interaction phenomena, such as absorption-induced scattering, exciton-plasmon coupling and morphology-dependent surface plasmon light-trapping are observed to give rise to improved light trapping at different regions of the solar spectrum. Additionally, an approach to achieve the theoretical limits to the efficiency of excitonic organic photovoltaics (~22%) will be proposed that involves control of radiative recombination rate, and optimization of both photoluminescence quantum efficiency and photon recycling in organic semiconductor thin-films.