Optical design of organic solar cell with hybrid plasmonic system

We propose a novel optical design of organic solar cell with a hybrid plasmonic system, which comprises a plasmonic cavity coupled with a dielectric core-metal shell nanosphere. From a rigorous solution of Maxwell's equations, called volume integral equation method, optical absorption of the active polymer material has a four-fold increase. The significant enhancement mainly attributes to the coupling of symmetric surface wave modes supported by the cavity resonator. The dispersion relation of the plasmonic cavity is characterized by solving an 1D eigenvalue problem of the air/metal/polymer/metal/air structure with finite thicknesses of metal layers. We demonstrate that the optical enhancement strongly depends on the decay length of surface plasmon waves penetrated into the active material. Furthermore, the coherent interplay between the cavity and the dielectric core-metal shell nanosphere is undoubtedly confirmed by our theoretical model. The work offers detailed physical explanations to the hybrid plasmonic cavity device structure for enhancing the optical absorption of organic photovoltaics. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America