Ultrasensitive, Highly Repeatable, Ultrafast MoO3/P-Si Heterostructure-Based Photodetector

This article presents the development of an ultrasensitive molybdenum trioxide/porous silicon (MoO3/P-Si) heterostructure-based photodetector. Process scalability, high speed, higher detectivity, and repeatability are the key parameters of the demonstrated efficient photodetector. The P-Si and MoO3 nanoflakes (NFs) are synthesized by anodization and oxidation of RF-sputtered Mo thin film at 500 °C, respectively. The proposed MoO3/P-Si photodetector exhibits a high photo-to-dark current ratio (PDCR) in the order of $\approx 4\times 10^{{2}}$ and a lower dark current ( ${I}_{\text {d}}$ ). In addition, the MoO3/P-Si device exhibits a significantly improved photoresponsivity of 2.1 A/W and a detectivity of $9.1\times 10^{{11}}$ Jones compared with the other photodetectors (P-Si and MoO3). The MoO3/P-Si heterojunction-based photodetector shows $\approx 4$ times improved detectivity than P-Si and $\approx 14$ times improved detectivity than MoO3. Moreover, the device shows an ultrafast rise/fall times (0.09/0.05 s) with excellent stability and repeatability. These results demonstrate a high-performance and highly repeatable photodetector based on MoO3/P-Si heterojunction. The excellent performance of MoO3/P-Si heterojunction indicates that it has great application prospects in the field of visible photodetectors.