High-Efficiency Organic Tandem Solar Cells With Effective Transition Metal Chelates Interconnecting Layer

Organic tandem solar cells have two sub-cells vertically connected via a tunnel junction (or interconnecting layer, ICL), which the ICL plays a critical role of determining the performance of the tandem cell. In this manuscript, we report a new design of the ICL consisting of zirconium (IV) acetylacetonate (Zr-Acac) as the electron transport layer. The Zr-Acac has a suitable work function to pin the Fermi-level of the ICL and hence, can effectively behave as the charge recombination function for the tandem device. Comparing to the reference device consisting of ZnO ETL layer, the Zr-Acac ICL can effectively enhance the efficiency by 20%, from 8.4 to 10.1% power conversion efficiencies. More importantly, the Zr-Acac ETL layer functions effectively without thermal annealing, which not only simplifies the tandem solar cell processing, but also widens the front sub-cell material selection.