Dipole modification of photovoltaic junctions

Material interfaces play a critical role in a solar cell. Any presence of defects will have a negative impact on the device performance. Dipole interfacial modification provides a possibility to tailer the properties of an interface, e.g. work function matching, wettability, surface passivation and etc, hence improving the device performance. Through careful design of the dipole molecule, we are able to fine tune the properties of an interface between various materials types and these leads to a whole new route towards better performing photovoltaics. One example can be thiol modification on gold interdigitated back-contact perovskite solar cells carried out in our research group[1].

1. Lin, X., et al., Dipole-field-assisted charge extraction in metal-perovskite-metal back-contact solar cells. Nature Communications, 2017. 8(1): p. 613.