Ultrafast response of spontaneous photovoltaic effect in 3R-MoS₂-based heterostructures

Rhombohedrally stacked MoS₂ has been shown to exhibit spontaneous polarization down to the bilayer limit and can sustain a strong depolarization field when sandwiched between graphene. Such a field gives rise to a spontaneous photovoltaic effect without needing any p-n junction. In this work, we show that the photovoltaic effect has an external quantum efficiency of 10% for devices with only two atomic layers of MoS₂ at low temperatures, and identify a picosecond-fast photocurrent response, which translates to an intrinsic device bandwidth at ∼100-GHz level. To this end, we have developed a nondegenerate pump-probe photocurrent spectroscopy technique to deconvolute the thermal and charge-transfer processes, thus successfully revealing the multicomponent nature of the photocurrent dynamics. The fast component approaches the limit of the charge-transfer speed at the graphene-MoS₂ interface. The remarkable efficiency and ultrafast photoresponse in the graphene-3R-MoS₂ devices support the use of ferroelectric van der Waals materials for future high-performance optoelectronic applications.