Fast Photoelectric Conversion in the Near-Infrared Enabled by Plasmon-Induced Hot-Electron Transfer

Yuanfang Yu; Yue Sun; Zhenliang Hu; Xuhong An; Dongming Zhou; Hongzhi Zhou; Wenhui Wang; Kaiyang Liu; Jie Jiang; Dandan Yang; Zainab Zafar; Haibo Zeng; Fengqiu Wang; Haiming Zhu; Junpeng Lu; Zhenhua Ni

doi:10.1002/adma.201903829

Fast Photoelectric Conversion in the Near-Infrared Enabled by Plasmon-Induced Hot-Electron Transfer

Adv Mater. 2019 Oct;31(43):e1903829. doi: 10.1002/adma.201903829. Epub 2019 Sep 8.

Authors

Yuanfang Yu¹, Yue Sun², Zhenliang Hu³, Xuhong An¹, Dongming Zhou⁴, Hongzhi Zhou⁴, Wenhui Wang¹, Kaiyang Liu¹, Jie Jiang¹, Dandan Yang⁵, Zainab Zafar¹, Haibo Zeng⁵, Fengqiu Wang², Haiming Zhu⁴, Junpeng Lu¹, Zhenhua Ni¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Physics and Key Laboratory of MEMS of the Ministry of Education, Southeast University, Nanjing, 211189, China.
² School of Electronic Science and Engineering and Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210093, China.
³ Center for Advanced 2D Materials and Graphene Research Center, National University of Singapore, 6 Science Drive 2, Singapore, 117546, Singapore.
⁴ Centre for Chemistry of High-Performance & Novel Materials, Department of Chemistry, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China.
⁵ Institute of Optoelectronics and Nanomaterials, College of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210094, China.

PMID: 31495984
DOI: 10.1002/adma.201903829

Abstract

Interfacial charge transfer is a fundamental and crucial process in photoelectric conversion. If charge transfer is not fast enough, carrier harvesting can compromise with competitive relaxation pathways, e.g., cooling, trapping, and recombination. Some of these processes can strongly affect the speed and efficiency of photoelectric conversion. In this work, it is elaborated that plasmon-induced hot-electron transfer (HET) from tungsten suboxide to graphene is a sufficiently fast process to prevent carrier cooling and trapping processes. A fast near-infrared detector empowered by HET is demonstrated, and the response time is three orders of magnitude faster than that based on common band-edge electron transfer. Moreover, HET can overcome the spectral limit of the bandgap of tungsten suboxide (≈2.8 eV) to extent the photoresponse to the communication band of 1550 nm (≈0.8 eV). These results indicate that plasmon-induced HET is a new strategy for implementation of efficient and high-speed photoelectric devices.

Keywords: graphene; hot-electron transfer; infrared photodetection; localized surface plasmon resonance; photoelectric conversion.

Abstract

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