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Combined plasmonic gratings in organic solar cells

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Abstract

We propose an organic solar cell structure with combined silver gratings consisting of both a front and a back grating. This combination provides multiple, semi-independent enhancement mechanisms which act additively, so that a broadband absorption is obtained. Both gratings couple the incident light into various plasmonic modes, showing a more localized or propagating character respectively. In addition, some modes only appear for tilted incident light, and therefore present a complex angle-dependent behavior. We provide extensive numerical simulations, resulting in an optimized period of 490nm, with front grating elements of 60 by 10nm and back elements of 60 by 30nm. With these parameters an integrated absorption enhancement factor around 1.35 is observed, with absorption increasing from 48% to 65% under TM polarized light. In addition, the solar cell with combined gratings is much less sensitive to the angle of incident light than the single grating cases. Furthermore, the grating structure does not have a large influence on the TE polarized light absorption.

©2011 Optical Society of America

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Figures (6)

Fig. 1
Fig. 1 (a) Schematic diagram of OSCs with combined gratings (front and back grating). (b) Optical constants of P3HT:PCBM with 1:1 weight ratio, n and k are the real and the imaginary parts of the refractive index.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2 (a) The absorption spectra of the organic layer with combined grating (blue solid line), front grating only (green dash-dotted), back grating only (red dashed) and planar reference structure without grating (black dotted). The insets show the E and H amplitude profile at wavelength 740nm for the combined case. (b) Intensity enhancement spectrum at a point close to a lower corner of front grating (blue solid line) and at a point close to an upper corner of back grating (red dashed line) for combined grating, normalized by the incident field.
Fig. 3
Fig. 3 (a) Map of absorption in the organic layer versus the wavelength of incident light and the grating period. (b) The period dependence of integrated absorption (blue solid line). The value for the reference structure is indicated by the black dotted line.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4 Angular dependence of absorption with (a) combined grating, (b) front grating, (c) back grating, (d) planar device. Blue solid and red dashed lines superimposed in (a)–(c) are calculated Bloch mode dispersion curves. White dashed and dash-dotted lines in (d) are folded dispersion lines of the planar reference structure (SPP mode) and the folded air light line, respectively.
Fig. 5
Fig. 5 H field magnitude distribution of Bloch modes. Top row shows bright modes, bottom row are dark modes. (a) and (b) combined grating, (c) and (d) front grating, (e) and (f) back grating case. The ‘+’ and ‘−’ signs denote π phase differences in the field profiles.
Fig. 6
Fig. 6 Integrated absorption versus incidence angle for TM (solid lines) and TE (dashed) polarizations. Blue: combined grating; green: front grating; red: back grating; black: planar structure.
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