Ultrasensitive solar-blind ultraviolet detection and optoelectronic neuromorphic computing using α-In₂Se₃ phototransistors

Abstract

Detection of solar-blind ultraviolet (SB-UV) light is important in applications like confidential communication, flame detection, and missile warning system. However, the existing SB-UV photodetectors still show low sensitivities. In this work, we demonstrate the extraordinary SB-UV detection performance of α-In₂Se₃ phototransistors. Benefiting from the coupled semiconductor and ferroelectricity property, the phototransistor has an ultraweak detectable power of 17.85 fW, an ultrahigh gain of 1.2 × 10⁶, a responsivity of 2.6 × 10⁵ A/W, a detectivity of 1.3 × 10¹⁶ Jones and an ultralow noise-equivalent-power of 4.2 × 10⁻²⁰ W/Hz^1/2 for 275 nm light. Its performance exceeds most other UV detectors, even including commercial photomultiplier tubes and avalanche photodiodes. It can be also implemented as an optoelectronic synapse for neuromorphic computing. A 784×300×10 artificial neural network (ANN) based on this optoelectronic synapse is constructed and demonstrated with a high recognition accuracy and good noise-tolerance for the Fashion-MNIST dataset. These extraordinary features endow this phototransistor with the potential for constructing advanced SB-UV detectors and intelligent hardware.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

solar-blind ultraviolet detectors / α-In₂Se₃ / optoelectronic synapse / neuromorphic computing

References

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Electronic Supplementary Material

The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/10.1007/s11467-022-1241-7 and https://journal.hep.com.cn/fop/EN/10.1007/s11467-022-1241-7.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant Nos. 2021YFA1201500 and 2018YFA0703700), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 91964203, 61974036, 62274046, 22179029, and 12204122), the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Nos. XDB44000000), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2042021kf0067), and CAS Key Laboratory of Nanosystem and Hierarchical Fabrication. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS.

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