Alternating BiI3-BiI van der Waals Photodetector with Low Dark Current and High-Performance Photodetection.

The emerging two-dimensional (2D) van der Waals (vdW) materials and their heterostructures hold great promise for optoelectronics and photonic applications beyond strictly lattice-matching constraints and grade interfaces. However, previous photodetectors and optoelectronic devices rely on relatively simple vdW heterostructures with one or two blocks. The realization of high-order heterostructures has been exponentially challenging due to conventional layer-by-layer arduous restacking or sequential synthesis. In this study, we present an approach involving the direct exfoliation of high-quality BiI3-BiI heterostructure nanosheets with alternating blocks, derived from solution-grown binary heterocrystals. These heterostructure-based photodetectors offer several notable advantages. Leveraging the "active layer energetics" of BiI layers and the establishment of a significant depletion region, our photodetector demonstrates a significant reduction in dark current compared with pure BiI3 devices. Specifically, the photodetector achieves an extraordinarily low dark current (<9.2 × 10-14 A at 5 V bias voltage), an impressive detectivity of 8.8 × 1012 Jones at 638 nm, and a rapid response time of 3.82 µs. These characteristics surpass the performance of other metal-semiconductor-metal (MSM) photodetectors based on various 2D materials and structures at visible wavelengths. Moreover, our heterostructure exhibits a broad-band photoresponse, covering the visible, near-infrared (NIR)-I, and NIR-II regions. In addition to these promising results, our heterostructure also demonstrated the potential for flexible and imaging applications. Overall, our study highlights the potential of alternating vdW heterostructures for future optoelectronics with low power consumption, fast response, and flexible requirements.

Advances in the Application of Perovskite Materials.

Nowadays, the soar of photovoltaic performance of perovskite solar cells has set off a fever in the study of metal halide perovskite materials. The excellent optoelectronic properties and defect tolerance feature allow metal halide perovskite to be employed in a wide variety of applications. This article provides a holistic review over the current progress and future prospects of metal halide perovskite materials in representative promising applications, including traditional optoelectronic devices (solar cells, light-emitting diodes, photodetectors, lasers), and cutting-edge technologies in terms of neuromorphic devices (artificial synapses and memristors) and pressure-induced emission. This review highlights the fundamentals, the current progress and the remaining challenges for each application, aiming to provide a comprehensive overview of the development status and a navigation of future research for metal halide perovskite materials and devices.

Ultraviolet-Visible-Short-Wavelength Infrared Broadband and Fast-Response Photodetectors Enabled by Individual Monocrystalline Perovskite Nanoplate.

Perovskite-based photodetectors exhibit potential applications in communication, neuromorphic chips, and biomedical imaging due to their outstanding photoelectric properties and facile manufacturability. However, few of perovskite-based photodetectors focus on ultraviolet-visible-short-wavelength infrared (UV-Vis-SWIR) broadband photodetection because of the relatively large bandgap. Moreover, such broadband photodetectors with individual nanocrystal channel featuring monolithic integration with functional electronic/optical components have hardly been explored. Herein, an individual monocrystalline MAPbBr3 nanoplate-based photodetector is demonstrated that simultaneously achieves efficient UV-Vis-SWIR detection and fast-response. Nanoplate photodetectors (NPDs) are prepared by assembling single nanoplate on adjacent gold electrodes. NPDs exhibit high external quantum efficiency (EQE) and detectivity of 1200% and 5.37 × 1012 Jones, as well as fast response with rise time of 80 µs. Notably, NPDs simultaneously achieve high EQE and fast response, exceeding most perovskite devices with multi-nanocrystal channel. Benefiting from the high specific surface area of nanoplate with surface-trap-assisted absorption, NPDs achieve high performance in the near-infrared and SWIR spectral region of 850-1450 nm. Unencapsulated devices show outstanding UV-laser-irradiation endurance and decent periodicity and repeatability after 29-day-storage in atmospheric environment. Finally, imaging applications are demonstrated. This work verifies the potential of perovskite-based broadband photodetection, and stimulates the monolithic integration of various perovskite-based devices.

Design of All-Dielectric Metasurface-Based Subtractive Color Filter by Artificial Neural Network.

Structural colors produced by light manipulating at subwavelength dimensions have been widely studied. In this work, a metasurface-based subtractive color filter (SCF) is demonstrated. The color display of the SCF is confirmed by finding the complementary color of colors filtered by SCF within the color wheel. In addition, two artificial neural network (ANN) models are utilized to accelerate the metasurface forward prediction, and the long short-term memory (LSTM) shows much better performance than traditional multilayer perceptron (MLP). Meanwhile, we train an inverse ANN model established with LSTM to recover the optimal geometric parameter combinations of the meta-atoms. With the variation of the geometric parameters of meta-atoms, versatile color displays of structural colors are realized. The metasurface we propose exhibits good performance of transmissive-type structural color in visible range. The work provides a method for high-efficiency geometric parameter prediction, and paves the way to nanostructure-based color design for display and anticounterfeiting applications.

Tunable fabrication of concave microlens arrays by initiative cooling-based water droplet condensation.

Microlens arrays (MLAs), as one of the key features in the optoelectronics field, have attracted a lot of attention recently. Unfortunately, existing fabrication methods of MLAs have many disadvantages, such as complex fabrication procedures and difficult morphology control. This paper presents a low-cost and tunable fabrication approach for concave MLAs on ultraviolet (UV) polymer surfaces. We used condensed water droplets, formed by initiative cooling, as the template for the formation of concave MLAs in this approach. A sacrificial layer of polymer material was introduced to fabricate concave MLAs with different morphology parameters. The three most important parameters of MLAs, i.e. diameter, cross-sectional profile, and packing distance, can be tuned by the proposed novel fabrication approach. By controlling the condensation time of water droplets, we can control the diameter of the concave MLAs. Moreover, the cross-sectional profile can be controlled by replacing the sacrificial layer material to change the interaction among the water droplets, sacrificial polymers, and UV polymers. In addition, the packing distance of the MLAs can also be adjusted by introducing the lateral flow of the sacrificial polymer, which was driven by the additional sacrificial polymer dispensed on the substrate. Furthermore, the UV polymer film with MLAs on its surface was applied for the packaging of high power green LEDs. Consequently, the optical output power of green LED modules is enhanced by 11.4% when using the MLAs at the driving current of 500 mA.