High-performance amorphous BeZnO-alloy-based solar-blind ultraviolet photodetectors on rigid and flexible substrates

Abstract In this study, the bandgap of ternary alloy BeZnO was modulated to make the material applicable to solar-blind ultraviolet (UV) radiation detection. This was done by preparing amorphous films with high Be doping contents on rigid c-sapphire and flexible polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and polyethylene naphthalene (PEN) substrates. After depositing a pair of parallel Al electrodes, amorphous BeZnO-alloy-based solar-blind UV photodetectors (PDs) with peak responsivity occurring at around 230 nm were constructed and their cut-off wavelengths are less than 284 nm. The PDs constructed on three substrates exhibit extremely low dark currents of 58.7 pA, 2.9 pA, and 1.8 pA, respectively. Time-dependent photoresponse cycling confirmed devices reproducible, and sensitive to solar-blind UV radiation. More importantly, the devices exhibited fast response speeds with rise times of approximately 40 ms and particularly fast recovery speeds with decay times of approximately 10 ms. Our research provides a method of constructing high-performance PDs on various substrates. And constructing amorphous solar-blind UV PDs on flexible substrate in this work is expected to be guiding significance to the design of PDs with deformability.