Surface plasmon resonance effect of Au nano particles on The efficiency of cds quantum dot- sensitized solar cells

Abstract

Quantum dot-sensitized solar cells are emerging as most promisingly cost-effective, third generation photovoltaic devices. Semiconductor quantum dots have gained more attention for a variety of optoelectronic device fabrications including solar cells, sensors, light emitting diodes,".lasers and spectrometers, due to their size-dependent optical absorption and emission, ability of multiple exciton generation and high molar extinction coefficients.In order to enhance the performance of quantum dot solar cells, photo anode can be modified by introducing different TiO2 nano structures or by incorporating metallic nanoparticles. In this work, TiO2 photoanode was sensitized with CdS quantum dots by successive. ionic layer adsorption and reaction (SILAR) technique and the number of SILAR cycles were optimized with similar TiO2 electrodes for best solar cell performance. Au colloidal nanoparticles were synthesized by the cit rate reduction method. Solar cells were fabricated by using CdS quantum dot-sensitized TiO2 photoanodes incorporating Au plasmonic nanoparticles. The best plasmon-enhanced solar cell shows an efficiency of 3.977o with a short-circuit current density of 19.25 mA cm-2 and open-circuit voltage of 531-3 mV, under the simulated light of 100 mW cm-2 with AM 1.5 spectral filter.Efficiency and short-circuit photocurrent density have been enhanced, by 24.45Vo and l8.53%o respectively. The enhancement in the short-current photocurrent is evidently due to the localized surface plasmon resonance effect by the Au nanoparticles.