ALD-Developed Plasmonic Two-Dimensional Au–WO₃–TiO₂Heterojunction Architectonics for Design of Photovoltaic Devices

Electrically responsive plasmonic devices, which benefit from the privilege of surface plasmon excited hot carries, have supported fascinating applications in the visible-light-assisted technologies. The properties of plasmonic devices can be tuned by controlling charge transfer. It can be attained by intentional architecturing of the metal–semiconductor (MS) interfaces. In this study, the wafer-scaled fabrication of two-dimensional (2D) TiO2 semiconductors on the granular Au metal substrate is achieved using the atomic layer deposition (ALD) technique. The ALD-developed 2D MS heterojunctions exhibited substantial enhancement of the photoresponsivity and demonstrated the improvement of response time for 2D Au–TiO2-based plasmonic devices under visible light illumination. To circumvent the undesired dark current in the plasmonic devices, a 2D WO3 nanofilm (∼0.7 nm) was employed as the intermediate layer on the MS interface to develop the metal–insulator–semiconductor (MIS) 2D heterostructure. As a result, 13.4% improvement of the external quantum efficiency was obtained for fabricated 2D Au–WO3–TiO2 heterojunctions. The impedancometry measurements confirmed the modulation of charge transfer at the 2D MS interface using MIS architectonics. Broadband photoresponsivity from the UV to the visible light region was observed for Au–TiO2 and Au–WO3–TiO2 heterostructures, whereas near-infrared responsivity was not observed. Consequently, considering the versatile nature of the ALD technique, this approach can facilitate the architecturing and design of novel 2D MS and MIS heterojunctions for efficient plasmonic devices.