Boosted radiative energy transfer of plasmonic electrodes enables flexible organic photovoltaics with efficiency over 18%

The light extinction caused by plasmonic effects is the bottleneck of developing the highly transparent silver nanowires (AgNWs)-based electrode in the applications of flexible organic photovoltaics. Here, a new electrode architecture is proposed to remit the surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) of AgNWs through hot-nanoimprint introduced lateral buds, which can couple SPPs to radiation via non-radiative damping and thus reduce the plasmonic energy loss. The boosted radiative energy transfer generates a broadband increase in optical transmittance of AgNWs, yielding the highest value of 91.2% and an average one of 87.56%. Due to the synergetic effect of plasmon out-coupling, anti-reflection, and morphological improvement of the deformed AgNWs electrode, flexible organic photovoltaics obtain an 8.7% increase in power conversion efficiency as compared to their counterpart, achieving a state-of-the-art efficiency of 18.1%.