Photocarrier behavior in organic heterojunction photovoltaic cells

We have investigated the bias dependence of photocurrent in several organic heterojunction cells to elucidate the behavior of photogenerated charge carriers. Both the planar and planar-mixed heterojunction devices are shown to always have negative photocurrent even at large forward biases; this phenomena has been attributed to an increased driving force for carrier diffusion away from the heterointerface as the applied bias increases. In contrast, the drift current generally dominates in mixed heterojunction devices due to distributed nature of charge generation throughout the active layer. leading to a photocurrent that is highly dependent on the internal electric field. This dependence gives rise to the reversal of the photocurrent direction at high biases when compared to that at the short-circuit condition. However, the voltage yielding zero photocurrent shows appreciable wavelength dependence, which is strongly correlated to the detailed charge carrier generation profile within the active layer. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.