Porphyrin- and fullerene-based molecular photovoltaic devices

We have developed a new strategy for the construction of molecular photovoltaic devices where the porphyrins and fullerenes employed as building blocks are organized into nanostructured artificial photosynthetic systems by self-assembly processes highly efficient photosynthetic energy- and electron-transfer processes take place at gold and indium tin oxode (ITO) electrodes modified with self-assembled monolayers of porphyrin- of fullerene linked systems. Porphyrins and fullerenes have also been assembled step by step to make large and uniform clusters on nanostructured semiconductor electrodes which exhibit a high power-conversion efficiency of close to 1%. These results will provide valuable information on the design of donor-acceptor-type molecular assembles that can be tailored to construct highly efficient photovoltaic devices.