Large-area, flexible broadband photodetector based on WS2 nanosheets films

High performance, flexible broadband photodetectors based on two-dimensional materials have attracted extensive research interest due to their potential applications. However, these reported flexible photodetectors are generally fabricated into micron-nano devices due to the limited size of two-dimension material, with a narrow spectrum detection range, which has seriously hindered their applications in large-area, broadband photodetector. Herein, we have prepared WS2 nanosheets film via typical hydrothermal intercalation and vacuum filtration methods to fabricate a large-area, flexible broadband photodetector. The fabricated devices respond to a broadband wavelength from visible light to near-infrared light (532–1064 nm), and exhibit a responsivity of 4.04 mA/W and a detectivity of 2.55 × 109 Jones at 532 nm irradiation. Moreover, even in an arbitrary bending condition, our fabricated photodetectors show consistently stable photoresponse characteristics. All the results indicate that our stratagem in this work will be a more convenient and practical guidance for the future flexible optoelectronic devices. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd