µSR Study with Light Irradiation of P3HT:ZnO Nanoparticles as Active Material of Hybrid Solar Cells

Recently, hybrid solar cell that consists of a combination of organic and inorganic materials offers a promise in increasing efficiency. Combination of conjugated polymer of Poly(3-hexyl thiophene)/P3HT which has the highest hole mobility with inorganic materials which has high electron mobility, good physical and chemical stability of inorganic nanocrystals, shows a better performance of hybrid solar cells. We have conducted a measurement to investigate the charge carrier transport in active material of hybrid solar cells by using muon spin relaxation (µSR) with light irradiation. A bulk sample used in this study is hybrid organic-inorganic material consisting of regio-regular P3HT and ZnO nanoparticles. Longitudinal-field µSR measurements were performed in magnetic field ranging from 0 to 395 mT at temperature of 10 K, 15 K and 25 K. Based on µSR measurement with light irradiation, we found that for those temperatures, longitudinal field dependence of λ1 was proportional with C-H^0.5 curve indicating three-dimensional inter-chain diffusion. We assume that light irradiation initiates the production of exciton that increases the number of charge carrier in the sample and transports not only along the chain of polymer (one-dimensional) but also perpendicular to other chain of polymer (three-dimensional). With light irradiation, the crossover temperature from one-dimensional to three-dimensional of regio-regular P3HT and ZnO nanoparticles bulk sample was obtained at lower temperature of 10 K compared to previous result at 25 K without light irradiation.