Publication date: 15th December 2025
The continuous development in smart devices and microsystems for the control of industrial processes, biomedical sensors and instruments, visible and NIR light communications, photovoltaics and many other applications, is triggering new demands for novel and low cost semiconductors. Metal halide perovskites can be a good solution, because of their good optoelectronic properties and tolerance against crystalline defects, other than low-cost processing and low CO2 footprint. Particularly, 2D lead halide perovskites, such as PEA2PbI4 and higher order Ruddlesden-Popper phases, can be easily synthesized in the form of single cyrstals with a multilayered structure defined by the octahedral planes of PbI4- separated by the long organic cations PEA+ and stacked by van der Waals interaction. In this way, multilayered nanoflakes can be exfoliated from single crystals in a wide range of thicknesses (tens to hundreds of nm) and lateral sizes of several tenths of microns in order to study their optical and optoelectronic properties. These nanoflakes were transferred onto micrometric photodevices by using Pt-prepatterned Si/SiO2 substrates with 10 µm of channel length. In such devices, photocurrents from 10 pA to 100 nA can be measured at relatively low voltage bias (around 1 V) under 450 nm laser light with incident powers in the range from 10 pW to more than 500 nW in steady state. The linear behaviour of photocurrent with incident power and a near constant responsivity would be indicative of a negligible presence of nonradiative channels associated to deep levels, whereas a sublinear response of the photocurrent to power can be characteristic of trap sensitized photoconductivity in the semiconductor. The spectral photoresponse exhibits a clear exciton resonance, slightly red-shifted with respect to micro-photoluminescence (µPL) due to reabsorption. Furthermore, the rise/decay of the photocurrent is very fast, < 1 µs, hence with a cut-off frequency over the MHz. Interestingly, µPL images showed that the lower energy component present in the PL spectra is being emitted by the edges of the perovskite nanoflakes. Our results on samples with different thicknesses point out to phototransport taking place at the monolayer/s touching the Pt-contact with photogenerated carriers originated from direct absorption followed by those produced from photons re-emitted at top monolayers and absorbed at the bottom ones.
Thanks to the Advanced Materials programme that was supported by MCIN with funding from NextGenerationEU and Generalitat Valenciana (project no. MFA-2022-066), and to the Project TSI-069100-2023-0012 (Cátedra Chip Universidad de Valencia), funded by the Secretaría de Estado de Telecomunicaciones e Infraestructuras Digitales.
