Extraordinary photocurrent harvesting at type-II heterojunction interfaces: toward high detectivity carbon nanotube infrared detectors

Despite the potentials and the efforts put in the development of uncooled carbon nanotube infrared detectors during the past two decades, their figure-of-merit detectivity remains orders of magnitude lower than that of conventional semiconductor counterparts due to the lack of efficient exciton dissociation schemes. In this paper, we report an extraordinary photocurrent harvesting configuration at a semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotube (s-SWCNT)/polymer type-II heterojunction interface, which provides highly efficient exciton dissociation through the intrinsic energy offset by designing the s-SWCNT/polymer interface band alignment. This results in significantly enhanced near-infrared detectivity of 2.3 × 10(8) cm·Hz(1/2)/W, comparable to that of the many conventional uncooled infrared detectors. With further optimization, the s-SWCNT/polymer nanohybrid uncooled infrared detectors could be highly competitive for practical applications.