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These articles were highlighted on the covers of the Advanced Optical Materials September issue:
Organic Solar Cells
A new plasmonic-enhanced organic solar cell is proposed by Y. Zhang, B. Q. Wei, W. C. H. Choy, and co-workers. They manage a collective plasmonic effect in light-harvesting to achieve the broadband absorption enhancement. As a result, a maximum power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 9.62% is achieved, which is the highest efficiency in plasmonic-enhanced organic solar cells reported to date.
SERS
A truly 3D “miniature optical lab” for molecule detection is achieved by S. Feng, Y. Zhang, and co-workers on the tip of an optical fiber. It is designed like a radar configuration: excited light is focused on the globular “cactus” by a parabolic mirror to excite the SERS of the molecules. These SERS signals are collected and sent back into the fiber with the parabolic mirror, for analysis. Such a 3D scheme expands the design possibilities of “labs” on the facets of optical fibers.
OLEDs
K. C. Choi and co-workers report enhanced light extraction from flexible organic light-emitting diodes incorporating plasmonic nanomesh electrodes that replace fragile ITO anodes. Deterministic enhancement of the light extraction is achieved when the surface plasmon loss is considerably suppressed by nanostructures formed of constituent layers. This indicates that reduction of parasitic waveguide loss with nanomesh electrodes is comparatively significant for obtaining high device efficiency, rather than the efforts to improve nanomesh transmittance.
