High stability of dark current enables stretchable near-infrared self-powered organic photodetectors

Ultra-flexible and stretchable organic photodetectors (s-OPDs) sensitive in the near-infrared (NIR) region hold great potential for wearable health monitoring with excellent physiological signal and skin conformability. However, the development of OPDs that combines NIR sensitivity, low power consumption, low cost, simple fabrication structure, and good mechanical properties is still challenging and has not been well explored. In this work, we report a self-powered s-OPD with a simple fabrication structure used for organic solar cells and a detectivity of more than 1 × 1012 Jones (corrected by noise current) in the NIR region at 10% tensile strain and short response time (2.46 μs), representing state-of-the-art performances. Reducing energetic disorders other than discrete traps in photoactive layers is more crucial to further reduce the dark current at zero bias. The dark current of the OPDs exhibits higher mechanical stability than photocurrent due to the slower degradation of the parallel resistance than the series resistance under tensile strain. The higher stability of dark current enables the s-OPDs as a stretchable organic photoplethysmogram heart rate sensor, showing excellent detectivity under 30% strain or 800 stretching–release cycles at 10% strain, indicating the great potential for application in wearable optoelectronics.