Light into Current Conversion in An Organic Solar Cell (VIDEO)

Istituto Nanoscienze -- CNR

Caption

Real time quantum simulation of the conversion of light into current in an organic solar cell composed of a polymer chain, and a Fullerene buckyball. The movie lasts for about 100 femtoseconds (fs), and is slowed down by about three hundred thousand billions of times with respect to the real phenomenon, in order to make the ultrafast time scale visible to humans. The quantity depicted illustrates the wavelike oscillations of an electron after light is absorbed at time 0. Each time the upper "bulb" (actually a Fullerene molecule) lights up, a current flows from the bottom to the top of the miniature solar cell. The inset quantifies the amount of charge transfered from the polymer to the Fullerene as a function of time.

Credit

Carlo A. Rozzi, Istituto Nanoscienze Cnr

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