Quantitative Determination of Contribution by Enhanced Local Electric Field, Antenna-Amplified Light Scattering, and Surface Energy Transfer to the Performance of Plasmonic Organic Solar Cells

Plasmonic metal nanostructures are widely used as subwavelength light concentrators to enhance light harvesting of organic solar cells through two photophysical effects, including enhanced local electric field (ELEF) and antenna-amplified light scattering (AALS), while their adverse quenching effect from surface energy transfer (SET) should be suppressed. In this work, a comprehensive study to unambiguously distinguish and quantitatively determine the specific influence and contribution of each effect on the overall performance of organic solar cells incorporated with Ag@SiO₂ core–shell nanoparticles (NPs) is presented. By investigating the photon conversion efficiency (PCE) as a function of the SiO₂ shell thickness, a strong competition between the ELEF and SET effects in the performance of the devices with the NPs embedded in the active layers is found, leading to a maximum PCE enhancement of 12.4% at the shell thickness of 5 nm. The results give new insights into the fundamental understanding of the photophysical mechanisms responsible for the performance enhancement of plasmonic organic solar cells and provide important guidelines for designing more-efficient plasmonic solar cells in general.