Ultrahigh-sensitive gas sensors based on doped phosphorene: A first-principles investigation

Recent significant advancements have been made in demonstrating the usage of phosphorene to detect the presence of gases leading to a new breed of gas sensor device. Based on pristine phosphorene, the devices can detect a small concentration of adsorbed molecules with high sensitivity at room temperature. In this work, we propose doping silicon and sulfur impurity atoms into phosphorene to drastically improve its gas sensing performance. We use a combination of density functional theory and non-equilibrium Green's function method to evaluate the sensitivity and selectivity of doped phosphorene nanosensors for four gases (NO, NO2, NH3, and CO). Both devices demonstrate a prominent distinction in conductance when the gas molecules are exposed to the sensor surface. We suggest the doped phosphorene may present advantages over the device based purely on phosphorene due to the ability to discriminate different gases controlled by types of dopants.