Enabling low-drift flexible perovskite photodetectors by electrical modulation for wearable health monitoring and weak light imaging

Abstract

Abstract Metal halide perovskites (MHPs) are promising for next-generation flexible photodetectors (FPDs) owing to their low-temperature solution processability, mechanical flexibility, and excellent photoelectric properties. However, the defects and notorious ion migration in polycrystalline MHPs often lead to high and unstable dark current, thus deteriorating their detection limit and long-term operations. Here, we propose an electrical field modulation strategy to significantly reduce the dark current of MHPs-based FPD more than 1000 times (from ~ 5 nA to ~ 5 pA). Meanwhile, ion migration in MHPs was effectively suppressed, and the MHPs-based FPD shows a long-term continuous operational stability (~ 8000 s) with low signal drift (~ 4.2 × 10− 4 pA per second) and ultralow dark current drift (~ 1.3 × 10− 5 pA per second). Benefitting from the electrical modulation strategy, a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) wearable photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor and an active-matrix photodetector array for weak light imaging are successfully demonstrated. This work offers a universal strategy to improve the performance of MHPs for wearable FPD and flexible image sensor applications.