Meniscus coated high open-circuit voltage bi-layer solar cells

Neat bi-layer solar cells of a fullerene acceptor and a cyanine dye donor were prepared using meniscus coating. Meniscus coating is very material efficient and leads to high quality pinhole-free films. The cells exhibit high open circuit voltages of 1 volt, only 0.8 eV below the band gap of the cyanine dye. This is one of the smallest differences reported for organic solar cells and illustrates an almost optimal donor-acceptor energy level alignment.