Atomically thin lateral p-n junction photodetector with large effective detection area

作者:Xu, Zai-Quan; Zhang, Yupeng; Wang, Ziyu; Shen, Yuting; Huang, Wenchao; Xia, Xue; Yu, Wenzhi; Xue, Yunzhou; Sun, Litao; Zheng, Changxi; Lu, Yuerui; Liao, Lei; Bao, Qiaoliang*
来源:2D Materials, 2016, 3(4): 041001.
DOI:10.1088/2053-1583/3/4/041001

摘要

The widely used photodetector design based on atomically thin transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) has a lateral metal-TMD-metal junction with a fairly small, line shape photoresponsive active area at the TMD-electrode interface. Here, we report a highly efficient photodetector with extremely large photoresponsive active area based on a lateral junction of monolayer-bilayer WSe2. Impressively, the separation of the electron-hole pairs (excitons) extends onto the whole 1L-2L WSe2 junction surface. The responsivity of the WSe2 junction photodetector is over 3200 times higher than that of a monolayer WSe2 device and leads to a highest external quantum efficiency of 256% due to the efficient carrier extraction. Unlike the TMD p-n junctions modulated by dual gates or localized doping, which require complex fabrication procedures, our study establishes a simple, controllable, and scalable method to improve the photodetection performance by maximizing the active area for current generation.