Light to useful charge in nanostructured organic and hybrid solar cells

Many different types of nanostructured thin-film materials and a combination of materials are considered in the search for efficient, cheap, and environmentally benign solar cells. The introduction of dye-sensitized solar cells ¹ in the early 1990s was a major step, and intense development work in many different directions have led to solar cells with power conversion efficiencies approaching 15%. ² Here we will describe some of our recent work aiming at correlating dye–semiconductor electron transfer, sensitizer binding geometry, and solar cell efficiency. The ultimate aim of this work is to develop methods to produce a sensitizer/semiconductor material with predictable light-harvesting and electron transfer properties.