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Updated: Feb 7, 2026

Scalable Syntheses of Graphene Oxide and Reduced Graphene Oxide using Cascade Design Oxidation and Highly Basic Reduction Reactions
Published on: July 3, 2025
Noncovalent phosphorylation of graphene oxide with improved hole transport in high-efficiency polymer solar cells
Xiang Chen1, Qing Liu, Mengmeng Zhang
1Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale, CAS Key Laboratory of Materials for Energy Conversion, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Synergetic Innovation Center of Quantum Information & Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China. sfyang@ustc.edu.cn.
Abstract:
Graphene oxide (GO) has been extensively applied as an alternative hole transport layer (HTL) of bulk heterojunction polymer solar cells (BHJ-PSCs) with the function of selectively transporting holes and blocking electrons, but suffers from low electrical conductivity. Herein, using phosphorus pentoxide (P2O5) dissolved in methanol as a precursor, we successfully modified GO via noncovalent phosphorylation for the first time, which showed improved hole transport in BHJ-PSCs compared to the pristine GO. As a result, BHJ-PSC devices based on noncovalently phosphorylated GO (P-GO) HTL show dramatically higher power conversion efficiencies (7.90%, 6.59%, 3.85% for PTB7:PC71BM, PBDTTT-C:PC71BM, P3HT:PC61BM, respectively) than those of the corresponding control devices based on the pristine GO HTL (6.28%, 5.07%, 2.78%), which are comparable to those of devices based on the most widely used HTL-poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS).
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