Chemically Engineered Titanium Oxide Interconnecting Layer for Multijunction Polymer Solar Cells

Abstract

We report chemically tunable n-type titanium oxides using ethanolamine as a nitrogen dopant source. As the amount of ethanolamine added to the titanium oxide precursor during synthesis increases, the Fermi level of the resulting titanium oxides (ethanolamine-incorporated titanium oxides) significantly changes from −4.9 eV to −4.3 eV, and their free charge carrier densities are enhanced by two orders of magnitudes, reaching up to 5 × 1018 cm−3. Unexpectedly, a basic ethanolamine reinforces not only the n-type properties of titanium oxides, but also their basicity, which facilitates acid–base ionic junctions in contact with acidic materials. The enhanced charge carrier density and basicity of the chemically tuned titanium oxides enable multi-junction solar cells to have interconnecting junctions consisting of basic n-type titanium oxides and acidic p-type PEDOT:PSS to gain high open-circuit voltages of 1.44 V and 2.25 V from tandem and triple architectures, respectively. © 2024 by the authors.