Extensive efforts have been made in recent years to explore the photovoltaic and photoelectrochemical properties of electrodes modified with various donor and acceptor components toward the realization of highly efficient organic solar cells. It is of vital importance to select suitable donor and acceptor and organize the donor and acceptor on the electrode surface in nanometer scale for achieving high cell performance. In this talk, we will present versatile approaches to organize donor and acceptor molecules on electrodes. In particular, various donors and acceptors and their composites have been successfully deposited electrophoretically onto nanostructured tin dioxide and titanium dioxide electrodes which exhibit efficient photocurrent generation. For instance, bottom-up self-organization of porphyrin and fullerene molecules onto the nanostructured tin dioxide electrodes has led to highly efficient photocurrent generation with an incident photon-to-current efficiency (IPCE) of up to ~60%. Cell performance with power conversion efficiency of ~5% has also been obtained for the tin dioxide cell modified with pi-extended tetraphenylporphyrin. Such examples will give a deep insight into the design of molecule-based solar cells.
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