Self-Quenching and Slow Hole Injection May Limit the Efficiency in NiO-Based Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells

A series of bis-tridentate ruthenium complexes was designed to feature opposite localizations of their lowest metal-to-ligand charge transfer (MLCT) excited states, relative to a carboxylic acid that served as a binding group to mesoporous NiO. The purpose was to study the effect of MLCT direction on the rates of hole injection into NiO and subsequent charge recombination. Surprisingly, femtosecond-transient absorption spectroscopy showed that the two heteroleptic, cyclometalated complexes of this series did not inject holes into NiO, but their excited states were nevertheless quenched in a rapid process (on the time scale of hundreds of picoseconds). An identical result was obtained for the dyes on nonreactive ZrO₂ and we therefore attribute the short MLCT lifetime to self-quenching, due the high surface concentrations of the dyes. We further show that self-quenching on this time scale can potentially compete with hole injection also for functional NiO sensitizers. A ruthenium polypyridine complex, which has previously been used for NiO-based solar cells, was shown to inject holes only very slowly (τ ≈ 5 ns), in contrast to the common notion that hole injection in dye-NiO systems is ultrafast (predominantly subpicosecond time scale). The hole injection yield was estimated to only ca. 20%, which matches the reported APCE value of the corresponding device [Freys, J. C.; Gardner, J. M.; D'Amario, L.; Brown, A. M.; Hammarström, L. Dalton Trans. 2012, 41, 13105]. Therefore, we suggest that slow injection and self-quenching might be a reason for the low photovoltaic performance of some p-type dye-sensitized solar cells.