We present a novel top-electrode spray-coating process for the solution-based deposition of silver nanowires (AgNWs) onto vacuum-processed small molecule organic electronic solar cells. The process is compatible with organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) and organic light emitting thin film transistors (OLETs) as well. By modifying commonly synthesized AgNWs with a perfluorinated methacrylate, we are able to disperse these wires in a highly fluorinated solvent. This solvent does not dissolve most organic materials, enabling a top spray-coating process for sensitive small molecule and polymer-based devices. The optimized preparation of the novel AgNW dispersion and spray-coating at only 30 °C leads to high performance electrodes directly after the deposition, exhibiting a sheet resistance of 10.0 Ω □(-1) at 87.4% transparency (80.0% with substrate). By spraying our novel AgNW dispersion in air onto the vacuum-processed organic p-i-n type solar cells, we obtain working solar cells with a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 1.23%, compared to the air exposed reference devices employing thermally evaporated thin metal layers as the top-electrode.

We measure basic network parameters of silver nanowire (AgNW) networks commonly used as transparent conducting electrodes in organic optoelectronic devices. By means of four point probing with nanoprobes, the wire-to-wire junction resistance and the resistance of single nanowires are measured. The resistance RNW of a single nanowire shows a value of RNW=(4.96±0.18) Ω/μm. The junction resistance RJ differs for annealed and non-annealed NW networks, exhibiting values of RJ=(25.2±1.9) Ω (annealed) and RJ=(529±239) Ω (non-annealed), respectively. Our simulation achieves a good agreement between the measured network parameters and the sheet resistance RS of the entire network. Extrapolating RJ to zero, our study show that we are close to the electrical limit of the conductivity of our AgNW system: We obtain a possible RS reduction by only ≈20% (common RS≈10 Ω/sq). Therefore, we expect further performance improvements in AgNW systems mainly by increasing NW length or by utilizing novel network geometries.

In this work, we present a new synthetic approach to colloidal PbS nanoplatelets (NPLs) utilizing a cation exchange (CE) strategy starting from CuS NPLs synthesized via the hot-injection method. Whereas the thickness of the resulting CuS NPLs was fixed at approx. 5 nm, the lateral size could be tuned by varying the reaction conditions, such as time from 6 to 16 h, the reaction temperature (120°C, 140°C), and the amount of copper precursor. In a second step, Cu + cations were replaced with Pb 2+ ions within the crystal lattice via CE. While the shape and the size of parental CuS platelets were preserved, the crystal structure was rearranged from hexagonal covellite to PbS galena, accompanied by the fragmentation of the monocrystalline phase into polycrystalline one. Afterwards a halide mediated ligand exchange (LE) was carried out in order to remove insulating oleic acid residues from the PbS NPL surface and to form stable dispersions in polar organic solvents enabling thin-film fabrication. Both CE and LE processes were monitored by several characterization techniques. Furthermore, we measured the electrical conductivity of the resulting PbS NPL-based films before and after LE and compared the processing in ambient to inert atmosphere. Finally, we fabricated field-effect transistors with an on/off ratio of up to 60 and linear charge carrier mobility for holes of 0.02 cm 2 V −1 s −1 . † Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available: Additional TEM images of cation and ligand exchanged NPLs, the results of ICP-OES and EDX analyses, additional absorption spectra and XRD pattern of intermediate samples taken during CE. See

No abstract

No abstract