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Conventional solar cells based on Si are still expensive; their production requires high temperature and a large amount of energy, causing environmental concerns for their extensive application to solve the global energy crisis.
The discovery of fullerene [1] and conducting polymers at the end of last century[2], opened a new avenue, offering the possibility to create solar cells by using simple and environmentally friendly chemical processes.
Solar cells based on polymer-fullerene mixtures (bulk-heterojunction) recently achieved more than 8% efficiency, sparking enthusiasm all over the world, but several hurdles still limit a widespread application of this technology.
In this seminar I will introduce the basic concepts of the bulk heterojunction and I will present the results recently obtained by our group [3-5] in the microscopic investigation of polymer wrapping on carbon nanotubes, which suggest the way to improve the efficiency of these devices.