1 eV, determining that it can only absorb the incident light whose wavelength is shorter than 590 nm. Moreover, the carrier mobility of P3HT is only in magnitude of 10-3cm2V-1s-1, which will lead to PKC inhibitor severe carrier recombination in transport through

the thick P3HT:PCBM active layer. So, the practical thickness of the P3HT:PCBM active layer is commonly limited to be about 200 nm, and almost half of incident light can not be absorbed by the active layer. In order to resolve these problems, various inorganic materials with shorter bandgaps or higher carrier mobility including CdS, CdSe, and CuInS2 buy SB202190 were introduced into organic solar cells to fabricate hybrid solar cells to enhance their light absorption and carrier mobility [4–7]. For example, nanoparticles of CuInS2 have been embedded into conjugated polymer blends to fabricate hybrid solar Ro 61-8048 cells [7]. Compared with these inorganic materials, CuInSe2 has a lower energy gap (1.02 eV),

which leads to a considerably high absorption coefficient (about 105 cm-1), even higher than that of CuInS2. If different element ratios of Ga are added into CuInSe2, the bandgap and energy level of the formed CuIn x Ga1- x Se2 (CIGS) can be adjusted to match better with those of ITO electrodes and organic materials to achieve higher open voltage [8]. Furthermore, the CIGS has good conductivity, and its conductivity type depends on its stoichiometry, which can easily be varied in the synthesis processes according to the design of the solar cell. This is beneficial to fabricate the hybrid solar cells with different structures. Therefore, the CIGS is potential for use as inorganic absorbers

in the hybrid solar cells. So far, several deposition and post-treatment techniques, such as thermal co-evaporation, sputtering, Exoribonuclease electrodeposition, and selenization of prefabricated metallic layers, have been tried to achieve the requirements for CIGS syntheses [9–12]. The difficulties to control the stoichiometry of the CIGS thin films make these processes very complicated and much expensive. As one of the alternative techniques, pulsed laser deposition (PLD) is a convenient, economical, and effective method to deposit multi-component films because of its congruent ablation proceedings [13, 14]. In this article, a YAG:Nd laser was used in PLD to deposit CuIn0.8Ga0.2Se2 nanoparticles on ITO-glass substrates. The CIGS nanoparticles deposited at 400°C were introduced between the conjugated polymer layers and ITO electrodes in the photovoltaic structures of polymer solar cells to improve their light absorption and current density-voltage performance. The mechanism of the enhancement of the light absorption and photoelectric conversion of the photovoltaic structure was investigated.