Photo-response of solution-processed hybrid germanium selenide nanosheets based photoelectrochemical devices

Abstract Germanium selenide attracts emerging attention for applications in high-performance field-effect transistors and photodetector, due to its unique photoelectric performances and tunable bandgap. Herein, the germanium selenide-reduced graphene oxide (GeSe-RGO) hybrid is successfully synthesized by loading liquid-phase exfoliated GeSe nanosheets on the 2D graphene via a hydrothermal reduction process. It is demonstrated that the photoresponse performance of the photoelectrochemical (PEC) device constructed by the synthesized GeSe-RGO hybrid is significantly enhanced in comparison to the one built by the sole GeSe nanosheets. The results of the PEC tests display the photocurrent density can reach to 8.45 μA/cm2 at the bias of 0.8 V, which is approximately 4 times that of sole GeSe nanosheets. Meanwhile, with the increase of illumination intensity, the photocurrent density of the GeSe-RGO photodetector almost presents a linear increase. When the illumination intensity is 90 mW/cm2, the photoresponsivity value is up to 116 μA/W. In addition, the GeSe-RGO hybrid shows a durable photoresponse capability under the bias of 0 V, revealing that such a hybrid has the excellent self-powered ability in the PEC system. There is no evident degradation on the photoresponsive performance of GeSe-RGO photodetector after 50 light on-off cycling, indicating the good stability of the hybrids. The enhanced performance of the GeSe-RGO hybrid is attributed to the outstanding photoresponsive capability of RGO and the effective separation of photo-generated electron-hole pairs. Our work indicates that the GeSe-RGO hybrid has great prospects for future applications in PEC-type photodetector devices.