High-performance deep ultraviolet photodetectors based on few-layer hexagonal boron nitride

Hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN), an isomorph of graphene, has attracted great attention owing to its potential applications as an ultra-flat substrate or gate dielectric layer in novel graphene-based devices. Besides, h-BN appears to be a promising material for deep ultraviolet (DUV) optoelectronic applications because of its extraordinary physical properties, such as wide band gap and high absorption coefficient. In this work, two-dimensional h-BN with controllable layers was synthesized on Cu foils by ion beam sputtering deposition, and DUV photodetectors were fabricated from the transferred h-BN layers on SiO2/Si substrates. The h-BN layers synthesized at the higher substrate temperature possess a lower density of domain boundaries and higher crystalline quality, and the photodetectors based on a 3 nm h-BN layer exhibited high performance with an on/off ratio of >103 under DUV light illumination at 212 nm and a cutoff wavelength at around 225 nm. This work demonstrates that two-dimensional h-BN layers are promising for the construction of high-performance solar-blind photodetectors.