Roles of Interfacial Modifiers in Hybrid Solar Cells: Inorganic/Polymer Bilayer vs Inorganic/Polymer:Fullerene Bulk Heterojunction

Hybrid solar cells (HSCs) incorporating both organic and inorganic materials typically have significant interfacial issues which can significantly limit the device efficiency by allowing charge recombination, macroscopic phase separation, and nonideal contact. All these issues can be mitigated by applying carefully designed interfacial modifiers (IMs). In an attempt to further understand the function of these IMs, we investigated two IMs in two different HSCs structures: an inverted bilayer HSC of ZnO:poly­(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and an inverted bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cell of ZnO/P3HT:[6,6]-phenyl C₆₁-butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM). In the former device configuration, ZnO serves as the <i>n</i>-type semiconductor, while in the latter device configuration, it functions as an electron transport layer (ETL)/hole blocking layer (HBL). In the ZnO:P3HT bilayer device, after the interfacial modification, a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 0.42% with improved <i>V</i>_oc and FF and a significantly increased <i>J</i>_sc was obtained. In the ZnO/P3HT:PCBM based BHJ device, including IMs also improved the PCE to 4.69% with an increase in <i>V</i>_oc and FF. Our work clearly demonstrates that IMs help to reduce both the charge recombination and leakage current by minimizing the number of defect sites and traps and to increase the compatibility of hydrophilic ZnO with the organic layers. Furthermore, the major role of IMs depends on the function of ZnO in different device configurations, either as <i>n</i>-type semiconductor in bilayer devices or as ETL/HBL in BHJ devices. We conclude by offering insights for designing ideal IMs in future efforts, in order to achieve high-efficiency in both ZnO:polymer bilayer structure and ZnO/polymer:PCBM BHJ devices