Aging of flat heterojunction zinc phthalocyanine/fullerene C60 organic solar cells

Abstract This work addresses the long-term aging of organic solar cells based on a flat zinc phthalocyanine (ZnPc)/C 60 heterojunction. We investigate both the typical degradation behavior of the short circuit current and of the saturated photocurrent, defined as I (−1 V ). The latter remains constant after a relatively small initial decay, which is directly related to a substantial reduction of the contribution of excitons generated in C 60 to the external quantum efficiency. Mass spectroscopy analysis of the organic material after aging revealed oxidized C 60 and sub-products thereof. The reduction of I (−1 V ) is thus attributed to the reaction of C 60 molecules with oxygen impurities. The results strongly suggest that ZnPc/C 60 photovoltaic cells are intrinsically very stable on a time scale of thousand of hours if such reactions are prevented.