Improving optical performance of inverted organic solar cells by microcavity effect

Optical simulations have been performed to investigate the performance of inverted organic solar cells with metal-mirror microcavity structure formed by central active layer sandwiched between semitransparent silver (Ag) cathode and thick Ag anode. Compared to nearly optimized noncavity devices with indium tin oxide cathode, the total absorbed photons (TAPs) in a 70 nm-thick active layer for cavity devices can be improved by 16.3% due to microcavity effect. Furthermore, an improvement of over 10% in TAPs can be obtained when thin Ag layer is optimized to be 10–16 nm thick, indicating thin Ag layer is a good choice as transparent electrode material.