Liquid-metal based flexible a-IZTO ultrathin films for electrical and optical applications

Amorphous indium zinc tin oxide (a-IZTO) is a kind of transparent conductive oxide (TCO), which can be used in transparent electrodes, transistors, and flexible devices. At present, a key limitation of a-IZTO is the costly vacuum manufacturing technology, and its commercial production is also restricted by the complex raw material preparation process. In this article, we report a liquid metal-based van der Waals (vdW) exfoliation technique by which a-IZTO films with several nanometres thickness are fabricated. The a-IZTO films fabricated in ambient air have a size on the centimeter scale and an optical transmittance of 99.64%; they are also large-area flexible oxide films. In order to illustrate the capabilities of this technology, we fabricated thin film transistors (TFTs) and photodetectors based on a-IZTO films. An a-IZTO thin film transistor (TFT) has an on/off ratio of 10⁶. When the V_ds is 5 V, the responsivity, detectivity and external quantum efficiency of an a-IZTO photodetector are 7.57 × 10⁴ A W^-1, 4.00 × 10¹⁵ Jones and 3.68 × 10⁵%, respectively, exhibiting one of the top performances in this field.