Organic donor-acceptor heterojunctions for high performance circularly polarized light detection

Here, the authors report a strategy to fabricate multi-wavelength circularly polarized light photodetectors consisting of bilayer donor-acceptor heterojunctions with chiral active layers. Development of highly efficient and stable lateral organic circularly polarized light photodetector is a fundamental prerequisite for realization of circularly polarized light integrated applications. However, chiral semiconductors with helical structure are usually found with intrinsically low field-effect mobilities, which becomes a bottleneck for high-performance and multi-wavelength circularly polarized light detection. To address this problem, here we demonstrate a novel strategy to fabricate multi-wavelength circularly polarized light photodetector based on the donor-acceptor heterojunction, where efficient exciton separation enables chiral acceptor layer to provide differentiated concentration of holes to the channel of organic field-effect transistors. Benefitting from the low defect density at the semiconductor/dielectric interface, the photodetectors exhibit excellent stability, enabling current roll-off of about 3-4% over 500 cycles. The photocurrent dissymmetry value and responsivity for circularly polarized light photodetector in air are 0.24 and 0.28 A W-1, respectively. We further demonstrate circularly polarized light communication based on a real-time circularly polarized light detector by decoding the light signal. As the proof-of-concept, the results hold the promise of large-scale circularly polarized light integrated photonic applications.

Automated summary

In this paper, the authors propose a strategy to fabricate multi-wavelength circularly polarized light photodetectors using bilayer donor-acceptor heterojunctions with chiral active layers. The resulting photodetectors exhibit excellent stability and high responsivity, making them promising for large-scale circularly polarized light integrated photonic applications.