Interface science of emerging organic solar cell platforms: Electrochemical and spectroelectrochemical approaches to the characterization of interfacial charge transfer processes

Organic solar cell (OPV) energy conversion platforms have been identified as one possible pathway photovoltaic platforms with a cost of less than $1/W _p installed, and have recently shown impressive increases in efficiency. OPVs are created from inexpensive, earth-abundant, complex material sets with a multitude of oxide/organic, metal/organic and organic/organic' interfaces, whose composition and energetics can control device efficiency. This talk will focus on our recent efforts to bring electrochemical models and electrochemical/spectroelectrochemical characterization to study critical interfaces in OPV materials and platforms, demonstrating especially the enhanced sensitivity that ATR spectroelectrochemical studies can bring to the understanding of electron transfer to monolayers of redox active molecules which are components of OPV platforms.