Simultaneous Photomultiplication Improvement and Response Acceleration for High-Performance Lateral Polymer Photodetectors Based on Bulk Heterojunction

In organic photodetectors, photomultiplication is mainly originated from interfacial and/or bulk charge traps, which induces slow response due to the slow release of trapped charges and strongly limits the optimization of the overall performance. This study has exhibited a remarkable case that the gain (>1) and response speed of the lateral photodetectors are promoted simultaneously and effectively by increasing the trap ratio. For lateral photodetectors with silver nanoparticles and PDPPBTT:PC61BM bulk heterojunction, the gain increases from 12.7 to 19.8 and the fall time decreases from 313.4 to 172.9 ms as the PC61BM ratio increases from 5:1 to 1:1. The lateral photodetector structure with a long electrode distance has been testified to play the key role for simultaneous promotion compared with vertical photodiodes, allowing the charges to trap well in the PC61BM-rich phase at a high PC61BM ratio and accumulation of multiple built-in electric fields. The long channel distance and silver nanoparticles also effectively restrain the increment of dark current with PC61BM loading, resulting in a high detectivity of 1.7 × 1012 Jones under 0.031 mW cm–2 @ 820 nm. It is of great theoretical and practical value for the high-performance photodetectors with simultaneous high photomultiplication and quick response.