Achievement

IGERT Fellow, Neal Treat, has been working on improving the efficiency of organic photovoltaic through the development of high throughput methods. By using soft imprint lithography, a range of different organic and organic/inorganic ordered heterojunctions have been fabricated to control device architecture. Using materials that can pattern sub-100 nm features in a fast and reliable manner with large area coverage, a pattern of TiO2 has been fabricated from a solution based TiO2 sol-gel. The radius of the patterned TiO2 is on the order of the exciton diffusion length enabling maximum exciton harvesting. The research is very interdisciplinary requiring collaboration with engineers, chemists, and physicists to obtain a working solar cell. During this reporting period, Neal has collaborated with graduate student researcher, Brent Melot, in Ram Seshadri’s group in order to further characterize the inorganic layer in the solar cells.