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Black phosphorus inverter devices enabled by in-situ aluminum surface modification

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Abstract

Two-dimensional black phosphorus (BP) generally exhibits a hole-dominated transport characteristic when configured as field-effect transistor devices. The effective control of charge carrier type and concentration is very crucial for the application of BP in complementary electronics. Herein, we report a facile and effective electron doping methodology on BP, through in situ surface modification with aluminum (Al). The electron mobility of few-layer BP is found to be largely enhanced to ∼ 10.6 cm2·V–1·s–1 by over 6 times after aluminum modification. In situ photoelectron spectroscopy characterization reveals the formation of Al–P covalent bond at the interface, which can also serve as local gate to tune the transport properties in BP layers. Finally, a spatially-controlled aluminum doping technique is employed to establish a p–n homojunction on a single BP flake, and hence to realize the complementary inverter devices, where the highest gain value of ∼ 33 is obtained.

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Acknowledgements

Authors acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 21573156 and 21872100), Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (No. BK20170005), Singapore MOE Grants R143-000-652-112 and R143-000-A43-114, and Fundamental Research Foundation of Shenzhen (No. JCYJ20170817100405375).

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  1. Yue Zheng and Zehua Hu contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Yue Zheng & Min Lai

  2. Department of Physics, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117542, Singapore

    Yue Zheng, Zehua Hu, Du Xiang, Bo Lei, Yanan Wang & Wei Chen

  3. SZU-NUS Collaborative Innovation Center for Optoelectronic Science and Technology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China

    Cheng Han

  4. Department of Chemistry, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 117543, Singapore

    Rui Guo, Du Xiang & Wei Chen

  5. School of Physics and Electronics, Central South University, Changsha, 410083, China

    Jun He

  6. National University of Singapore (Suzhou) Research Institute, Suzhou, 215123, China

    Wei Chen

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  1. Yue Zheng
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  2. Zehua Hu
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Correspondence to Wei Chen.

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Zheng, Y., Hu, Z., Han, C. et al. Black phosphorus inverter devices enabled by in-situ aluminum surface modification. Nano Res. 12, 531–536 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-018-2246-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12274-018-2246-y

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