Origin of the light intensity dependence of the short-circuit current of polymer/fullerene solar cells

Abstract

A typical feature of polymer/fullerene based solar cells is that the current density under short-circuit conditions $\left(J_{\mathrm{sc}}\right)$ does not scale exactly linearly with light intensity $\left(I\right)$ . Instead, a power law relationship is found given by $J_{\mathrm{sc}}\propto I^{\alpha }$ , where $\alpha$ ranges from 0.85 to 1. In a number of reports this deviation from unity is speculated to arise from the occurrence of bimolecular recombination. We demonstrate that the dependence of the photocurrent in bulk heterojunction solar cells is governed by the build-up of space-charge in the device as a consequence of a difference in electron- and hole mobility. We have verified this for an experimental model system in which the mobility difference can be tuned from one to three orders of magnitude by changing the annealing treatment.