Light trapping in organic solar cells

One key problem in optimizing organic solar cells is to maximize the absorption of incident light and to keep the charge carrier transport paths as short as possible in order to minimize recombination losses during the charge carrier extraction. The large versatility of organic semiconductors and compositions requires specific optimization of each system. Due to the small thickness of the functional layers in the order of several ten nanometres, coherent optics has to be considered and therefore interference effects play a dominant role. Here we present and discuss concepts for light trapping in organic solar cells. These are wide gap layers in planar solar cells, folded solar cell architectures benefiting from the illumination under inclined incident angles and multiple reflections and absorptions as well as diffraction gratings embossed into the photoactive layer. (C) 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim