In this paper, we demonstrate high performance ultrathin silver (Ag) transparent electrodes with a thin MoO₃ nucleation layer based on the thermal evaporation method. The MoO₃/Ag transparent electrodes fabricated at different deposition rates were compared systematically on aspects of the transmission spectrum, surface resistance, and surface morphology. Our study indicates that with the presence of the MoO₃ nucleation layer, an Ag film of only 7 nm thick can achieve percolation and the film is porous instead of forming isolated islands. In addition, the increase of the deposition rate can yield obvious improvement of the surface morphology of the Ag film. Specifically, with the help of a 1 nm thick MoO₃ nucleation layer, the Ag film of 9 nm thick realized under the deposition rate of 0.7 nm/s has a surface resistance of about 20 ohm/sq and an average transmittance in the visible light range reaching 74.22%. Such a high performance of transmittance is superior to the reported results in the literature, which inevitably suffer obvious drop in the long wavelength range. Next, we applied the ultrathin MoO₃/Ag transparent electrode in organic solar cells. The optimized semitransparent organic solar cell displays a power conversion efficiency of 2.76% and an average transmittance in the visible range of 38% when light is incident from the Ag electrode side.
Keywords: Ag film; nucleation layer; organic solar cell; transparent electrode.