Mrs. Sara Jäckle Photo:
MPG/Björn Hoffmann
(August 17, 2015) An
HZB team headed by Prof. Silke Christiansen has made a surprising discovery
about hybrid organic/inorganic solar cells. Contrary to expectations, a diode composed
of the conductive organic PEDOT:PSS and an n-type silicon absorber material
behaves more like a pn junction between two semiconductors than like a
metal-semiconductor contact (Schottky diode).
Their results have now been published in the Nature journal
Scientific Reports (doi:10.1038/srep13008) and could point the way toward
improvements in hybrid solar cells.
The system they investigated is based on conventional n-type
silicon wafers coated with the highly conductive polymer mixture PEDOT:PSS and
displays a power conversion efficiency of about 14 %. This combination of
materials is currently extensively investigated by many teams in the research
community.
“We systematically surveyed the characteristic curves, the
dark current as well as the capacitance of such devices using silicon wafers
with different doping concentrations” explains Sara Jäckle, lead author of the
article and Ph.D. student in Prof. Silke Christiansen’s team (HZB Institute of
Nano-architectures for Energy Conversion and research group leader at the Max
Planck Institute for the Science of Light MPL in Erlangen). “We learned that
the characteristic curves in the dark as well as the open-circuit voltage of
the solar cells are dependent on the doping concentration of the silicon wafer.
This behaviour and the order of magnitude of the measured values do not
correspond at all to those of a typical Schottky junction.”