Enhanced Photoresponse of SnSe-Nanocrystals-Decorated WS₂ Monolayer Phototransistor

Single-layer WS2 has shown excellent photoresponse properties, but its promising applications in high-sensitivity photodetection suffer from the atomic-thickness-limited adsorption and band-gap-limited spectral selectivity. Here we have carried out investigations on WS2 monolayer based phototransistors with and without decoration of SnSe nanocrystals (NCs) for comparison. Compared to the solely WS2 monolayer, SnSe NCs decoration leads to not only huge enhancement of photoresponse in visible spectrum but also extension to near-infrared. Under excitation of visible light in a vacuum, the responsivity at zero gate bias can be enhanced by more than 45 times to ∼99 mA/W, and the response time is retained in millisecond level. Particularly, with extension of photoresponse to near-infrared (1064 nm), a responsivity of 6.6 mA/W can be still achieved. The excellent photoresponse from visible to near-infrared is considered to benefit from synergism of p-type SnSe NCs and n-type WS2 monolayer, or in other words, the formed p-n heterojunctions between p-type SnSe NCs and n-type WS2 monolayer.