In recent years, most organic photovoltaic (OPV) research efforts have been dedicated to the design of new active materials with improved charge carrier mobility, optimized light absorption characteristics and energy level, new interlayers, and carefully tuned bulk heterojunction (BHJ) microstructures. As a result, high power conversion efficiency (PCE) values have been achieved. Improving the PCE of OPV requires continued active layer and interlayer improvement. Our OPV team is working on different fronts, such as fundamental studies of OPV, development of new interfacial layers, dopant formulation for device improvement, multi-junction OPV, new device concepts, and OPV devices with stretchable substrates. These efforts have a similar primary goal: understanding underlying phenomena in OPV and pushing the efficiency of OPV closer to the practical limits.
