High-responsivity, High-detectivity Photomultiplication Organic Photodetector Realized by a Metal-Insulator-Semiconductor Tunneling Junction

TL;DR

This paper reports a high-responsivity, high-detectivity organic photodetector with suppressed dark current achieved by introducing an atomically thin Al2O3 layer, enabling advanced imaging applications.

Contribution

The study demonstrates a novel PM-OPD design with an Al2O3 interfacial layer that significantly improves responsivity and detectivity while reducing dark current.

Findings

Achieved a responsivity of 8294 A/W and detectivity of 6.76×10^14 Jones.

Suppressed dark current due to the Al2O3 layer.

Demonstrated a 26×26 pixel image sensor responsive to UV and visible light.

Abstract

Organic photodetectors (OPDs) possess bright prospects in applications of medical imaging and wearable electronics due to the advantages such as low cost, good biocompatibility, and good flexibility. Photomultiplication OPDs (PM-OPDs) enabled by the trap-assisted carrier tunneling injection effect exhibit external quantum efficiencies far greater than unity, thus the acquired responsivities are extremely high. However, the reported PM-OPDs with high responsivity performances are all accompanied by high dark currents due to the introduction of carrier traps, which inevitably results in inferior detectivities. In this work, we modify a P3HT:PCBM donor-rich PM-OPD by introducing an atomically thin Al2O3 interfacial layer through the ALD technique, obtaining a high responsivity of 8294 A/W and high detectivity of 6.76*10^14 Jones, simultaneously, both of which are among the highest reported for bulk heterojunction PM-OPDs. Ascribed to the introduction of the atomically thin Al2O3 layer, the metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) tunneling junction is formed, which brings forward a suppressed dark current along with an increased amounts of holes tunneling under forward bias. Meanwhile, the weak light detection limit of the modified PM-OPD within the linear response range reaches the level of nW/cm2. Based on the proposed PM-OPD, a proof-of-concept image sensor with 26*26 pixels is demonstrated, which can respond to both ultraviolet light and visible light. The PM-OPD based sensor arrays can find broad applications for medical imaging, wearable electronics, etc.