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•The work function of ITO was reduced by plasma treatment.•The reduction of the work function was attributed to the variation in chemical component of ITO surface.•The inverted solar cell without electron transport layer was fabricated using plasma-treated ITO.•Optimal power conversion efficiency of 3.22% was achieved.
In this paper, we investigated the performance of inverted organic solar cells (OSCs) with plasma-treated indium tin oxide (ITO) as the cathode for omitting an electron transport layer. The Ar plasma was produced by capcitively coupled plasma setup under 20Pa chamber pressure. For the device with the structure of plasma-treated ITO/P3HT:PCBM/MoO3/Ag, a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 3.22% was achieved, whereas PCE of 1.13% was recorded from the device fabricated with the pristine ITO. The photovoltaic performance was found to be dependent on the applied power of plasma. After analyzing by atomic force microscopy (AFM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), we concluded that the chemical component variation of ITOs surface resulted in the decrease of ITO work function, which meant that the ITO Fermi level became shallow relative to the vacuum level. The low work function of ITO should be responsible for the improvement of inverted OSCs because of the better energy level alignment between ITO and the photoactive layer.