MoS2/Paper Decorated with Metal Nanoparticles (Au, Pt, and Pd) Based Plasmonic-Enhanced Broadband (Visible-NIR) Flexible Photodetectors

Abstract

Even though there are reports on flexible photodetectors, one of the main issues that still needs to be resolved is the lower values of responsivity arising due to the use of non-conventional substrates such as polymers, cellulose paper, etc. There are ways to improve the responsivity, such as piezotronics and surface plasmonic resonance, but studies on utilizing the same for flexible substrates remain limited. Further, the comparative performance of different nanoparticles (NPs) remains unexplored. This report demonstrates the fabrication of flexible visible/near-infrared (NIR) photodetectors by functionalizing MoS2 grown on paper substrate with various noble metal NPs such as gold (Au), platinum (Pt), and palladium (Pd) for enhanced photoresponse. The metal NPs-MoS2 (Au, Pt, and Pd-NPs-MoS2) based photodetector shows a prominent improvement in the photoresponse characteristics when compared to pristine MoS2. Enhancement in the photodetector performance is mainly due to the localized surface plasmon resonance of prepared metal NPs and the increase in incident light scattering. Out of the fabricated metal NPs-MoS2 photodetectors, Au-NPs/MoS2 shows maximum responsivity of 99.3 and 46.03 mA W−1 under visible and NIR region, respectively which is ≈80 times higher than pristine MoS2.