Fully Depleted Self‐Aligned Heterosandwiched Van Der Waals Photodetectors

Abstract Room‐temperature‐operating highly sensitive mid‐wavelength infrared (MWIR) photodetectors are utilized in a large number of important applications, including night vision, communications, and optical radar. Many previous studies have demonstrated uncooled MWIR photodetectors using 2D narrow‐bandgap semiconductors. To date, most of these works have utilized atomically thin flakes, simple van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures, or atomically thin p–n junctions as absorbers, which have difficulty in meeting the requirements for state‐of‐the‐art MWIR photodetectors with a blackbody response. Here, a fully depleted self‐aligned MoS₂‐BP‐MoS₂ vdW heterostructure sandwiched between two electrodes is reported. This new type of photodetector exhibits competitive performance, including a high blackbody peak photoresponsivity up to 0.77 A W⁻¹ and low noise‐equivalent power of 2.0 × 10⁻¹⁴ W Hz^−1/2, in the MWIR region. A peak specific detectivity of 8.61 × 10¹⁰ cm Hz^1/2 W⁻¹ under blackbody radiation is achieved at room temperature in the MWIR region. Importantly, the effective detection range of the device is twice that of state‐of‐the‐art MWIR photodetectors. Furthermore, the device presents an ultrafast response of ≈4 µs both in the visible and short‐wavelength infrared bands. These results provide an ideal platform for realizing broadband and highly sensitive room‐temperature MWIR photodetectors.