Plasmonic structures integrated in organic solar cells

Experimental and numerical results concerning the influence of silver nanoparticles on the optical absorption of organic devices are presented. The metallic nanoparticles (NPs) are placed inside an interpenetrated poly(3-hexylthiophene): [6,6]-phenyl-C61-butyric acid methyl ester (P3HT:PCBM) layer using a physical vapor deposition technique. An absorption enhancement by comparison to devices without NPs is shown. An increase of the absorption by annealing is also observed. Moreover, calculations are performed via a numerical analysis based on a Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) method. We demonstrate that the light absorption can mainly occur inside the active layer instead of inside the metallic NPs.