Flexible, transparent and self-powered deep ultraviolet photodetector based on Ag NWs/amorphous gallium oxide Schottky junction for wearable devices

Abstract Wearable photodetector, owing to the significant development of intelligent and integrated science and technologies, have caused great concern recently on account of their wide potential applications in smart monitoring. Self-powered is the trend of future development for the wearable photodetector due to the increased demand of energy-saving, miniaturization and high efficiency in devices. Gallium oxide, with a bandgap energy of 4.9 eV, is a perfect material for the next generation deep ultraviolet (DUV) photodetectors. In this work, Ag nanowires (NWs)/amorphous gallium oxide (a-GaO) Schottky junction was constructed on the conductive flexible substrate for self-powered DUV wearable photodetectors. The photoelectricity performance of Ag NWs/a-GaO based DUV photodetector is related to the density of Ag NWs electrode. Under the zero bias, the photodetector shows a photoresponse time of 0.24 s, a high light-to-dark ratio of 120 and a good repeatability under 254 nm light illumination with a light intensity of 3000 μW/cm2. Moreover, it exhibits the excellent mechanical properties, whose photoelectric performance is almost unchanged under the strain of 0.25 %. The Ag NWs/a-GaO based DUV photodetector combining the flexible with self-powered property, meets great well with the wearable device requirements.