Highly Sensitive, Fast Graphene Photodetector with Responsivity >106 A/W Using a Floating Quantum Well Gate.

Graphene, owing to its zero-band-gap electronic structure, is promising as an absorption material for ultra-wideband photodetection applications. However, graphene-absorption-based detectors inherently suffer from poor responsivity because of weak absorption and fast photocarrier recombination, limiting their viability for low-intensity light detection. Here, we use a graphene/WS2/MoS2 vertical heterojunction to demonstrate a highly sensitive photodetector, where the graphene layer serves dual purposes, namely, as the light absorption layer and also as the carrier conduction channel, thus maintaining the broadband nature of the photodetector. A fraction of the photoelectrons in graphene encounter ultrafast interlayer transfer to a floating monolayer MoS2 quantum well, providing a strong quantum-confined photogating effect. The photodetector shows a responsivity of 4.4 × 106 A/W at 30 fW incident power, outperforming photodetectors reported till date where graphene is used as a light absorption material by several orders. In addition, the proposed photodetector exhibits an extremely low noise equivalent power of <4 fW/ Hz and a fast response (∼milliseconds) with zero reminiscent photocurrent. The findings are attractive toward the demonstration of a graphene-based highly sensitive, fast, broadband photodetection technology.

Strong Single- and Two-Photon Luminescence Enhancement by Nonradiative Energy Transfer across Layered Heterostructure.

The strong light-matter interaction in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) is promising for nanoscale optoelectronics with their direct band gap nature and the ultrafast radiative decay of the strongly bound excitons these materials host. However, the impeded amount of light absorption imposed by the ultrathin nature of the monolayers impairs their viability in photonic applications. Using a layered heterostructure of a monolayer TMD stacked on top of strongly absorbing, nonluminescent, multilayer SnSe2, we show that both single-photon and two-photon luminescence from the TMD monolayer can be enhanced by a factor of 14 and 7.5, respectively. This is enabled through interlayer dipole-dipole coupling induced nonradiative Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) from SnSe2 underneath, which acts as a scavenger of the light unabsorbed by the monolayer TMD. The design strategy exploits the near-resonance between the direct energy gap of SnSe2 and the excitonic gap of monolayer TMD, the smallest possible separation between donor and acceptor facilitated by van der Waals heterojunction, and the in-plane orientation of dipoles in these layered materials. The FRET-driven uniform single- and two-photon luminescence enhancement over the entire junction area is advantageous over the local enhancement in quantum dot or plasmonic structure integrated 2D layers and is promising for improving quantum efficiency in imaging, optoelectronic, and photonic applications.

Asymmetrically Encapsulated Vertical ITO/MoS2 /Cu2 O Photodetector with Ultrahigh Sensitivity.

Strong light absorption, coupled with moderate carrier transport properties, makes 2D layered transition metal dichalcogenide semiconductors promising candidates for low intensity photodetection applications. However, the performance of these devices is severely bottlenecked by slow response with persistent photocurrent due to long lived charge trapping, and nonreliable characteristics due to undesirable ambience and substrate effects. Here ultrahigh specific detectivity (D*) of 3.2 × 1014 Jones and responsivity (R) of 5.77 × 104 A W-1 are demonstrated at an optical power density (Pop ) of 0.26 W m-2 and external bias (Vext ) of -0.5 V in an indium tin oxide/MoS2 /copper oxide/Au vertical multi-heterojunction photodetector exhibiting small carrier transit time. The active MoS2 layer being encapsulated by carrier collection layers allows us to achieve repeatable characteristics over large number of cycles with negligible trap assisted persistent photocurrent. A large D* > 1014 Jones at zero external bias is also achieved due to the built-in field of the asymmetric photodetector. Benchmarking the performance against existing reports in literature shows a viable pathway for achieving reliable and highly sensitive photodetectors for ultralow intensity photodetection applications.

Substrate effects in high gain, low operating voltage SnSe2 photoconductor.

High gain photoconductive devices find wide spread applications in low intensity light detection. Ultra-thin layered materials have recently drawn a lot of attention from researchers in this regard. However, in general, a large operating voltage is required to obtain large responsivity in these devices. In addition, the characteristics are often confounded by substrate induced trap effects. Here we report multi-layer SnSe2 based photoconductive devices using two different structures: (1) SiO2 substrate supported inter-digitated electrode (IDE), and (2) suspended channel. The IDE device exhibits a responsivity of [Formula: see text] A W-1 and [Formula: see text] A W-1 at operating voltages of 1 mV and 100 mV, respectively-a superior low voltage performance over existing literature on planar 2D structures. However, the responsivity reduces by more than two orders of magnitude, while the transient response improves for the suspended device-providing insights into the critical role played by the channel-substrate interface in the gain mechanism. The results, on one hand, are promising for highly sensitive photoconductive applications consuming ultra-low power, and on the other hand, show a generic methodology that could be applied to other layered material based photoconductive devices as well for extracting the intrinsic behavior.

Photoresponse of atomically thin MoS2 layers and their planar heterojunctions.

MoS2 monolayers exhibit excellent light absorption and large thermoelectric power, which are, however, accompanied by a very strong exciton binding energy - resulting in complex photoresponse characteristics. We study the electrical response to scanning photo-excitation on MoS2 monolayer (1L) and bilayer (2L) devices, and also on monolayer/bilayer (1L/2L) planar heterojunction and monolayer/few-layer/multi-layer (1L/FL/ML) planar double heterojunction devices to unveil the intrinsic mechanisms responsible for photocurrent generation in these materials and junctions. A strong photoresponse modulation is obtained by scanning the position of the laser spot, as a consequence of controlling the relative dominance of a number of layer dependent properties, including (i) the photoelectric effect (PE), (ii) the photothermoelectric effect (PTE), (iii) the excitonic effect, (iv) hot photo-electron injection from metal, and (v) carrier recombination. The monolayer and bilayer devices show a peak photoresponse when the laser is focused at the source junction, while the peak position shifts to the monolayer/few-layer junction in the heterostructure devices. The photoresponse is found to be dependent on the incoming light polarization when the source junction is illuminated, although the polarization sensitivity drastically reduces at the monolayer/few-layer heterojunction. Finally, we investigate the laser position dependent transient response of the photocurrent to reveal that trapping of carriers in SiO2 at the source junction is a critical factor to determine the transient response in 2D photodetectors, and also show that, by a systematic device design, such trapping can be avoided in the heterojunction devices, resulting in a fast transient response. The insights obtained will play an important role in designing a fast 2D TMD based photodetector and related optoelectronic and thermoelectric devices.

Valley-Coherent Hot Carriers and Thermal Relaxation in Monolayer Transition Metal Dichalcogenides.

We show room-temperature valley coherence in MoS2, MoSe2, WS2, and WSe2 monolayers using linear polarization-resolved hot photoluminescence (PL) at energies close to the excitation, demonstrating preservation of valley coherence before sufficient scattering events. The features of the copolarized hot luminescence allow us to extract the lower bound of the binding energy of the A exciton in monolayer MoS2 as 0.42 (±0.02) eV. The broadening of the PL peak is found to be dominated by a Boltzmann-type hot luminescence tail, and using the slope of the exponential decay, the carrier temperature is extracted in situ at different stages of energy relaxation. The temperature of the emitted optical phonons during the relaxation process is probed by exploiting the corresponding broadening of the Raman peaks due to temperature-induced anharmonic effects. The findings provide a physical picture of photogeneration of valley-coherent hot carriers and their subsequent energy relaxation pathways.