Organic Photovoltaics Publications

Today I came across a graph I prepared two years ago: the number of papers published per year in scientific journals within the field of organic photovoltaics. OPV in WOS (Number of Publications per Year) - 2007.pngI just updated it using Web Of Science, up to year 2007.

In case you want to reproduce the graph, I used the topic

“organic photovoltaic cell” or “organic photovoltaics” or “organic solar cell*”

for organic photovoltaics and related phrases, and

“bulk heterojunction solar cell*” or “bulk-heterojunction solar cell*” or “polymer photovoltaic” or “polymer fullerene photovoltaic” or “polymer solar cell*” or “polymer fullerene solar cell*” or “polymer-fullerene solar cell*” or “polymer-fullerene solar cell*”

Web of Science can also combine search sets in the history, so that publications matching both sets are not counted twice; the result is shown as the curve “both” in the graph. Probably, by a more appropriate choice of search terms, even some more papers can be found. For instance, I should have included small molecules.

The result is not strictly growing exponentially, but the interest still is increasing continuously. Let’s hope that the commercial interest will have similar growth rates soon;-)

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A potential candidate for trimolecular recombination?

Lately, we have talked about recombination, also discussing instances where trimolecular recombination has been observed experimentally. From the different excited states observed in organic solar cells, it is not obvious which combination could be participating in a trimolecular loss process. By the way, chemists seem to know the occurance of termolecular recombination, though in different circumstances.

One candidate for an excitation involving three species it the so called trion. Turkish Coast in November SunComing from inorganic semiconductor physics, and meaning charged exciton, it has been described for organic matter already more than 20 years ago [Pope 1984] as

bound exciton plus hole (excitonic ion)

In this review (including the references therein, in particular [Agranovich 1979]), an attractive interaction between exciton and charge is described.
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