Achievement

IGERT trainee O.R. (Chemistry) collaborated with a student in Chemical Engineering to apply his novel developments in scanning probe microscopy to her new composite materials for organic photovoltaic devices. They were able to explain device performance trends in terms of observed nanoscale morphology and electrical properties, resulting in new and surprising insights both into polymer solar cell physics and the nature of our measurements. In particular, they find spatial heterogeneity can contribute to the imperfect internal quantum efficiency even in relatively efficient organic photovoltaics and that fully 3D modeling is needed to describe the device physics of polymer blend solar cells.