Photoconductive Cathode Interlayer for Highly Efficient Inverted Polymer Solar Cells

A highly photoconductive cathode interlayer was achieved by doping a 1 wt % light absorber, such as perylene bisimide, into a ZnO thin film, which absorbs a very small amount of light but shows highly increased conductivity of 4.50 × 10^–3 S/m under sunlight. Photovoltaic devices based on this kind of photoactive cathode interlayer exhibit significantly improved device performance, which is rather insensitive to the thickness of the cathode interlayer over a broad range. Moreover, a power conversion efficiency as high as 10.5% was obtained by incorporation of our photoconductive cathode interlayer with the PTB7-Th:PC₇₁BM active layer, which is one of the best results for single-junction polymer solar cells.