Recent progress in high-performance photo-detectors enabled by the pulsed laser deposition technology

In the past decade, photo-detectors have been demonstrated to have very important applications in image sensing, optical communication, fire detection, environmental monitoring, space exploration, safety detection, and many other scientific research and industrial technology fields and are regarded as the key components of wearable devices. Compared to traditional fabrication approaches, pulsed-laser deposition (PLD)-grown materials for photo-detectors offer several merits. First, PLD is a clean physical vapor deposition approach. A stoichiometric amount of atoms can be transferred from the target to the substrate, avoiding complicated and potentially dangerous chemical reactions. Furthermore, the PLD process is carried out in a high-vacuum environment. Therefore, almost no contaminants, such as catalysts, precursors, surfactants and by-products, will be introduced. Also, the thickness of the films can be controlled by simply manipulating the energy and pulse number of the pulsed laser. Furthermore, the fabrication temperature is relatively low, which is available to deposit materials on various substrates, even flexible ones. Most importantly, PLD is a deposition technology with large area coverage, which can produce centimeter-scale thin films, the planar geometry of which has significant potential for compact device integration with modern semiconductor techniques. Consequently, this review introduces the recent advances on the materials, fabrication, and application of pulsed-laser deposition for a variety of high-performance photo-detectors from an overall perspective. Moreover, the challenges and future development trends are discussed.