TY  - JOUR
A1  - Nikolis, Vasileios C.
A1  - Mischok, Andreas
A1  - Siegmund, Bernhard
A1  - Kublitski, Jonas
A1  - Jia, Xiangkun
A1  - Benduhn, Johannes
A1  - Hörmann, Ulrich
A1  - Neher, Dieter
A1  - Gather, Malte C.
A1  - Spoltore, Donato
A1  - Vandewal, Koen
T1  - Strong light-matter coupling for reduced photon energy losses in organic photovoltaics
T2  - Nature Communications
N2  - Strong light-matter coupling can re-arrange the exciton energies in organic semiconductors. Here, we exploit strong coupling by embedding a fullerene-free organic solar cell (OSC) photo-active layer into an optical microcavity, leading to the formation of polariton peaks and a red-shift of the optical gap. At the same time, the open-circuit voltage of the device remains unaffected. This leads to reduced photon energy losses for the low-energy polaritons and a steepening of the absorption edge. While strong coupling reduces the optical gap, the energy of the charge-transfer state is not affected for large driving force donor-acceptor systems. Interestingly, this implies that strong coupling can be exploited in OSCs to reduce the driving force for electron transfer, without chemical or microstructural modifications of the photoactive layer. Our work demonstrates that the processes determining voltage losses in OSCs can now be tuned, and reduced to unprecedented values, simply by manipulating the device architecture.
Y1  - 2019
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/48474
SN  - 2041-1723
VL  - 10
PB  - Nature Publ. Group
CY  - London
ER  -