Combining ZnO and Organosilica Nanodots as a Thick Cathode Interlayer for Highly Efficient and Stable Inverted Polymer Solar Cells

Low-work-function metal oxides as cathode interlayers are widely used in polymer organic solar cells (PSCs), but the surface defect and intrinsic photocatalysis issues severely affect the high efficiency, thickness insensitivity, and stability of PSCs. In this work, we used organosilica nanodots (OSiNDs) to modify ZnO as cathode interlayers via the self-assembly method. The ZnO/OSiNDs bilayer can acquire a suitable work function and a high conductivity of 5.87 × 10–4 S m–1. Through systematic studies, there is stable surface coordination interaction of Zn–N bonding between ZnO and OSiNDs. In i-PSCs, using D18:Y6 as the active layer, the ZnO/OSiNDs-based device achieves the best PCE of 17.87%. More importantly, due to the high conductivity, the PCE for the device based on a 68 nm thick ZnO/OSiNDs interlayer is still high up to 16.53%, while the PCE for the device based on a 66 nm thick ZnO interlayer is only 13.18%. For photostability, the PCE of the device based on the ZnO/OSiNDs interlayer maintains 95% of its original value after continuous AM 1.5G illumination (contains UV light) at 100 mW/cm2 for 600 min, while that of the ZnO-based device only maintains 72% of the original value. This work suggests that ZnO/OSiNDs can be utilized as a cathode interlayer to fabricate highly efficient and stable PSC over a wide range of thicknesses.