Chinese scientists have investigated the optical and electronic contributions to efficiency improvements in polymer solar cells with Au nanoparticles.
The absorption enhancement due to incorporation of Au NPs is insignificant and provides only a minor contribution to power conversion efficiency improvement. This is due to the lateral distribution feature of the strong near-field of plasmonic resonance around the metallic NPs. The results should also apply to other metallic NPs such as Ag and Pt included in organic thin film solar cells.
The team say that that it is necessary to account for near-field physics in order to provide a full picture for the effective optical design of photovoltaics. (J. Mater. Chem., 2011, DOI: 10.1039/C1JM12820E)
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