Singlet Fission Solar Cells

^a, Neil Greenham^a

^aUniversity of Cambridge - UK, The Old Schools, Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TN, UK, Cambridge, United Kingdom

International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics
Proceedings of International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics 2015 (HOPV15)

Roma, Italy, 2015 May 11th - 13th

Organizer: Filippo De Angelis

Invited Speaker Session, Neil Greenham, presentation 177
Publication date: 5th February 2015

The efficiency of single-junction solar cells, whether silicon, organic or perovskite, is fundamentally limited by inefficient conversion of the high-energy portion of the the solar spectrum. I will describe how this limit may be overcome using the process of singlet fission, where a photogenerated singlet exciton in an organic semiconductor such as pentacene or tetracene rapidly splits into two lower-energy triplet excitons, each of which may separately contribute to the photocurrent in a solar cell. Recently, we have shown that these triplet excitons can be efficiently transferred to PbSe nanoparticles, which can then emit photons [1]. This "photon multiplier" structure, combining organic and inorganic semiconductors, could be applied to the front surface of any solar cell. We calculate that in the ideal case the efficiency of a silicon solar cell could be boosted from 20% to 24%. Current challenges to reaching this limit include improving the luminescence efficiency of the nanoparticles, and tuning the triplet exciton and nanoparticle energies to match the solar cell bandgap. I will describe our recent work to implement singlet fission in devices, and will relate this to some of the physics of the ultrafast fission process, the separation and recombination of pairs of triplet states, and the transfer of excitations from organic to inorganic semiconductors.

1. Tabachnyk, M.; Ehrler, B; Gelinas, S.; Boehm M. L.; Walker, B. J.; Musselman, K. P.; Greenham, N. C.; Friend, R. H.; Rao, A. Resonant Energy Transfer of Triplet Excitons from Pentacene to PbSe Nanocrystals. Nat. Mater. 2014, 13, 1033-1038.

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