| Conjugated polymers are attractive for use in photovoltaic (PV) cells because they are highly absorptive, their absorption spectrum can be tuned to match various regions of the solar spectrum and their solubility in common solvents enables the use of low-cost printing technique to mass produce PV panels. Photoexcitation of conjugated polymers forms excitons, which are bound electron-hole pairs. In order to convert these excitons into free carriers, the polymers have to be blended with an electron acceptor in close promixity of ∼10 nm. The charge transfer process at the donor-acceptor interface provides the necessary driving force to split excitons, while the close proximity guarantees excitons reaching an interface before decaying. Once the carriers are split, they have to be transported to their respective electrodes before recombining. Ordered nanostructured titania (TiO2) matrix infiltrated with conjugated polymers is a promising acceptor-donor system, which can potentially meet these requirements.; In this work, several optimizations are shown to be essential for increasing the performance of TiO2/polymer cells. First, we measure the hole mobility of poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) in a thin film diode in the space-charge limited regime. We show that the mobility increases with the polymer molecular weight and can be correlated to the film morphology. The anisotropy in P3HT chain packing suggests that its diode mobility of 10-4 cm 2/Vs can be further enhanced upon chain alignment in straight nanopores. Second, we investigate the use of molecular surface modification to control the interfacial energetics and charge transfer dynamics. By introducing dipoles at the TiO2/P3HT interface, the interfacial energy offset can be changed resulting in a concomitant change in the open circuit voltage. In addition, certain modifiers improve exciton harvesting by mediating charge transfer from the polymer to TiO2. We further show that the use of an amphiphilic molecule suppresses charge recombination across the TiO 2/P3HT interface. By controlling open circuit voltage, enhancing photocurrent and suppressing recombination through interface modification, the power efficiency of TiO2/P3HT device is almost doubled. Lastly, we demonstrate a novel imprinting method to nanostructure straight pores in TiO2, which can be infiltrated with conjugated polymers to make ordered inorganic-organic PV cells. |
