Surface-plasmon enhanced absorption in organic solar cells by employing a periodically corrugated metallic electrode

Abstract

We demonstrate improved efficiency of organic solar cells (OSCs) by employing a periodically corrugated metallic electrode in the OSCs. The improved efficiency can be attributed to the absorption enhancement resulted from the excitation of propagating surface-plasmon polariton (SPP) modes at the corrugated metal/organic interface. Through tuning the SPP resonance to the intrinsic absorption region, the short circuit current of the corrugated device with appropriate period has been increased from 4.1 mA/cm2 for planar device to 5.5 mA/cm2. The power conversion efficiency exhibits an enhancement of 35%.