Effect of polymer morphology on P3HT-based solid-state dye sensitized solar cells: an ultrafast spectroscopic investigation.

Solid-state dye sensitized solar cell devices are fabricated with poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) as the hole transporting layer. Upon annealing treatment we obtained ≈ 70% increase in the device efficiency compared to un-annealed devices. Our investigation, by means of ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopic characterization, correlates the increased device performances to a more efficient hole-transfer at the dye/polymer interface in the thermally treated P3HT.

Ultrafast dynamics of exciton fission in polycrystalline pentacene.

We use ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy with sub-20 fs time resolution and broad spectral coverage to directly probe the process of exciton fission in polycrystalline thin films of pentacene. We observe that the overwhelming majority of initially photogenerated singlet excitons evolve into triplet excitons on an ∼80 fs time scale independent of the excitation wavelength. This implies that exciton fission occurs at a rate comparable to phonon-mediated exciton localization processes and may proceed directly from the initial, delocalized, state. The singlet population is identified due to the brief presence of stimulated emission, which is emitted at wavelengths which vary with the photon energy of the excitation pulse, a violation of Kasha's Rule that confirms that the lowest-lying singlet state is extremely short-lived. This direct demonstration that triplet generation is both rapid and efficient establishes multiple exciton generation by exciton fission as an attractive route to increased efficiency in organic solar cells.

Plasmonic dye-sensitized solar cells using core-shell metal-insulator nanoparticles.

We present an investigation into incorporating core-shell Au-SiO(2) nanoparticles into dye-sensitized solar cells. We demonstrate plasmon-enhanced light absorption, photocurrent, and efficiency for both iodide/triiodide electrolyte based and solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells. Our spectroscopic investigation indicates that plasmon-enhanced photocarrier generation competes well with plasmons oscillation damping with in the first tens of femtoseconds following light absorption.

Four wave mixing at air-dielectric interfaces with a femtosecond laser excitation.

In this article we report our experimental results on non collinear four-wave mixing (FWM) at air-dielectric interfaces. We generated FWM signal from the two interfaces of a 1mm thick fused silica slide with air using two 800 nm, 100 fs pump pulses in non-collinear pump-probe type geometry. We observe that there is a maximum peak shift of approximately 1.5 nm in FWM signals corresponding to the two interfaces of the same silica slide. Further, we find that the intensity of FWM signal observed at air to silica interface is less than that from silica to air interface. We briefly elaborate on this observation with systematic study of FWM in fused silica.

Nonlinear optical absorption and switching properties of gold nanoparticle doped SiO2-TiO2 sol-gel films.

The nonlinear optical absorption and switching properties of sol-gel derived of Au nanoparticle doped SiO2-TiO2 sol-gel films having different Au-surface plasmon absorption positions are reported in this paper. The Au nanoparticles are embedded in SiO2 and SiO2-TiO2 mixed glassy film matrices with different refractive index values. To study the nonlinear absorption properties, lasers with three different wavelengths are used. The optical switching behavior is studied by using the pump-probe technique with 532 nm as the excitation wavelength. Ground state conduction band, surface plasmon band, and the free carrier band are taken as three level model to explain theoretically the obtained RSA and SA behaviors.