Scalable Fabrication of Atomically Thin Monolayer MoS2 Photodetectors

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a scalable method to fabricate high-quality monolayer MoS2 photodetectors with ultra-high sensitivity and fast response, suitable for advanced nanophotonics applications.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable CVD-based fabrication process for monolayer MoS2 photodetectors with high performance and device uniformity, advancing practical nanophotonics device development.

Findings

Negligible dark current ($10 fA$) in devices

Photocurrent peaks at 1.9 eV and 2.1 eV due to excitons

Rise time of 0.5 ms, much faster than previous CVD MoS2 photodetectors

Abstract

Scalable fabrication of high quality photodetectors derived from synthetically grown monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides is highly desired and important for wide range of nanophotonics applications. We present here scalable fabrication of monolayer MoS2 photodetectors on sapphire substrates through an efficient process, which includes growing large scale monolayer MoS2 via chemical vapor deposition (CVD), and multi-step optical lithography for device patterning and high quality metal electrodes fabrication. In every measured device, we observed the following universal features: (i) negligible dark current $(I_{dark}\leqslant10 fA)$; (ii) sharp peaks in photocurrent at $\sim$1.9eV and $\sim$2.1eV attributable to the optical transitions due to band edge excitons; (iii) a rapid onset of photocurrent above $\sim$2.5eV peaked at $\sim$2.9eV due to an excitonic absorption originating from the van Hove singularity of MoS$_2$. We observe low ($\leqslant 300\%$) device-to-device variation of photoresponsivity. Furthermore, we observe very fast rise time $\sim$0.5 ms, which is three orders of magnitude faster than other reported CVD grown 1L-MoS$_2$ based photodetectors. The combination of scalable device fabrication, ultra-high sensitivity and high speed offer a great potential for applications in photonics.