A common way to increase the solar cell efficiencies is to adjust the differences between HOMO and LUMO level of the polymer so that the excitons can be harvested with minimal lost. A fluorine atom is usually added to polymer backbone but it is a multistep process and has a considerable fabrications cost.
A team of chemists led by Jianhui Hou from the Chinese Academy of Sciences created a polymer known as PBT-OP from two commercially available monomers and one easily synthesized monomer. Wei Ma, a post-doctoral physics researcher from NC State and corresponding author on a paper describing the research, conducted the X-ray analysis of the polymer's structure and the donor:acceptor morphology.
PBT-OP was not only easier to make than other commonly used polymers, but a simple manipulation of its chemical structure gave it a lower HOMO level than had been seen in other polymers with the same molecular backbone. PBT-OP showed an open circuit voltage (the voltage available from a solar cell) value of 0.78 volts, a 36 percent increase over the ~ 0.6 volt average from similar polymers.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-01-simple-cheap-solar-cell-efficiency.html#jCp
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