Hollow Au nanorattles for boosting the performance of organic photovoltaics

Plasmonic effects are an effective approach to improve the efficiency of organic photovoltaics (OPVs) by enhancing the light absorption of the devices. In this work, we design hollow and spectrally tunable Au nanorattles as nanophotonic inclusions to achieve plasmon-enhanced OPVs for the first time. Compared to conventional bulk structures, these hollow Au nanorattles exhibit stronger and broader plasmon resonances. Consequently, they can significantly enhance the performance of the nanorattle-embedded solar cells due to matchable absorption, plasmon resonance energy transfer and plasmonic near-field enhancement in the devices. More importantly, this technique is applicable to various types of OPVs by tuning the structure of the nanorattles. This work paves the way for using hollow plasmonic nanostructures with controllable optical properties in OPVs as an alternative approach to effectively enhance device performance.