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Probing photoelectrical transport in lead halide perovskites with van der Waals contacts

Abstract

Lead halide perovskites have attracted increasing interest for their exciting potential in diverse optoelectronic devices. However, their charge transport properties remain elusive, plagued by the issues of excessive contact resistance and large hysteresis in ambient conditions. Here we report a van der Waals integration approach for creating high-performance contacts on monocrystalline halide perovskite thin films with minimum interfacial damage and an atomically clean interface. Compared to the deposited contacts, our van der Waals contacts exhibit two to three orders of magnitude lower contact resistance, enabling systematic transport studies in a wide temperature range. We report a Hall mobility exceeding 2,000 cm2 V–1 s–1 at around 80 K, an ultralow bimolecular recombination coefficient of 3.5 × 10–15 cm3 s–1 and a photocurrent gain >106 in the perovskite thin films. Furthermore, magnetotransport studies reveal a quantum-interference-induced weak localization behaviour with a phase coherence length up to 49 nm at 3.5 K. Our results lay the foundation for exploring new physics in this class of ‘soft-lattice’ materials.

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Fig. 1: Characterization of monocrystalline CsPbBr3 thin film.
Fig. 2: Formation of damage-free vdW-contacts by transfer approach.
Fig. 3: Performance of the vdW-contacts.
Fig. 4: Electrically probing the photocarrier dynamics of perovskites using vdW-contacts.
Fig. 5: Magnetoresistance at the lowest temperatures.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank T. Atallah and J. Caram for discussions. X.D. acknowledges support by the Office of Naval Research through grant no. N00014-18-1-2707 for device fabrications and characterizations, and the US Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Science and Engineering through award DE-SC0018828 for materials growth. Y.H. acknowledges support by the National Science Foundation EFRI-1433541 for partial support of material preparation. Y. Z. acknowledges support by National Key Research and Development Program of China through grant no. 2018YFA0703503 and National Natural Science Foundation of China through grant no. 51991342 for materials characterizations. I.S. acknowledges the support by the International Scientific Partnership Program at King Saud University (ISPP-148). We acknowledge the Electron Imaging Center at UCLA for transmission electron microscopy technical support and the Nanoelectronics Research Facility at UCLA for device fabrication technical support.

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X.D. conceived the research. X.D., Y.W., Q.Q., Z.W. and Y.L. designed the experiments. Y.W., Q.Q. and Z.W. performed the experiments and data analysis. Y.L. and J.G. contributed to device fabrications and initial electrical measurements. Z.K. and I.S. contributed to optical measurement and mobility discussions. Y.K.W. and C.L. conducted the X-ray diffraction measurements. Z.F. and Z.L. contributed to transmission electron microscopy characterizations. C.J. and P.W. helped to make the electrodes. M.G., X.D.D., Y.Z. and Y.H. contributed to discussions and supervised the research. X.D., Y.W. and Q.Q. co-wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Xiangfeng Duan.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–9, Tables 1–3 and references.

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Wang, Y., Wan, Z., Qian, Q. et al. Probing photoelectrical transport in lead halide perovskites with van der Waals contacts. Nat. Nanotechnol. 15, 768–775 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-020-0729-y

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