Solution-processable exfoliation and photoelectric properties of two-dimensional layered MoS₂ photoelectrodes

MoS₂ based photoelectrodes with different thickness have been fabricated by liquid phase exfoliation and vacuum filtration method. Absorption spectra clearly demonstrated two splitting absorption peaks due to the spin-orbit coupling and first principle calculation also indicate the spin-orbit coupling effect. These results combined with the SEM and TEM measurement suggests that the randomly stacked MoS₂ films can maintain the properties of few-layered materials with good quality. As a proof-of-principle applications, photoelectrochemical experiments of MoS₂ based photoelectrodes manifests that these MoS₂ films are one kind of reversible and stable optoelectronic materials with tunable microampere photocurrent as the change of film thickness. The rising and decay response of photocurrent are in the scale of several seconds. The results will be useful for the MoS₂ based scalable photovoltaic devices and photodetectors.