Simple, Sustainable Fabrication of Fully Solution-Processed, Transparent, Metal-Semiconductor Photodetectors Using a Surgical Blade as an Alternative to Conventional Tools

Abstract

Fabrication of optoelectronic devices relies on the expensive, energy-consuming conventional tools such as chemical vapor deposition, lithography, and metal evaporation. Furthermore, the films used in these devices are usually deposited at elevated temperatures and under vacuum that impose further restrictions to the device fabrication. Developing an alternative technology would contribute to the efforts on achieving a more sustainable optoelectronics technology. Keeping this focus in our focus, here we present a simple technique to fabricate visible photodetectors. These fully solution-processed and transparent metal-semiconductor-metal photodetectors employ silver nanowires (Ag NW) as the transparent electrodes replacing the indium-tin oxide (ITO) commonly used in optoelectronic devices. By repeatedly spin coating Ag NWs on a glass substrate followed by the coating of ZnO nanoparticles, we obtained a highly conductive transparent electrode reaching a sheet resistance of 95 Omega/square as measured by the four-probe method. Optical spectroscopy revealed that the transmittance of the Ag NW-ZnO films was 84% at 450 nm while transmittance of the ITO films was 90% at same wavelength. Following the formation of the conductive film, we scratched it using a heated surgical blade to open a gap. The scanning electron microscope images indicate that a gap of similar to 30 mm is opened forming an insulating line. As the active layer, we drop-casted red-emitting CdSe/ZnS core-shell quantum dots (QDs) on to this gap to form a metal-semiconductor-metal photodetector. These visible QD- based photodetectors exhibited responsivities and detectivities up to 8.5 mA/W and 0.95x10(9) Jones, respectively. These proof-of-concept photodetectors show that the environmentally friendly, low- cost, and energy-saving technique presented here can be an alternative to conventional, more expensive, and energy-hungry techniques while fabricating light-harvesting devices.