Project title: Strong Light-Matter Coupling in Organic Solar Cells
Project description:
Strong light-matter coupling effects have been demonstrated to lead to highly increased energy transfer distances in electron acceptor and donor systems, which are embedded inside a Fabry Pérot optical cavity. The origin of this effect is the formation of polaritonic states, which are hybrid delocalized states that are formed by strong exciton-photon coupling. We hypothesize that such strong light-matter coupling effects takes place inside carefully designed Non-Fullerene Acceptor (OPV) devices, considering the OPV device as an optical cavity, and that the delocalized energy transfer may strongly benefit device performance in Non-Fullerene Acceptor (NFA) Non-Fullerene Acceptor (OPV), and bilayer OPV. Furthermore, as the presence of polaritonic states in OPV devices could affect both energy and charge transfer processes, we will in this project study the possible role of such states for charge generation at nearly-zero energy level offsets in new NFA OPV devices. Whereas strong-light matter coupling has been demonstrated recently in an artificially constructed OPV device, the possible role of this effect on energy and charge transfer processes in OPV remains unexplored.
The aim of this project is to investigate the role of strong light-matter coupling effects on energy and charge transfer processes in OPV. The project consists of two linked objectives:
1) To develop efficient bilayer NFA OPV by utilizing long-range exciton diffusion, facilitated by strong light-matter coupling effects, and demonstrate their superior stability compared to conventional bulk heterojunction OPV architectures.
2) To elucidate the role of strong light-matter coupling effects on charge generation at nearly zero energy level offsets in these highly efficient NFA OPV.
surman@dtu.dk