A highly sensitive, large area, and self-powered UV photodetector based on coalesced gallium nitride nanorods/graphene/silicon (111) heterostructure

In this paper, we demonstrate an ultraviolet photodetector (UV-PD) that uses coalesced gallium nitride (GaN) nanorods (NRs) on a graphene/Si (111) substrate grown by plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy. We report a highly sensitive, self-powered, and hybrid GaN NR/graphene/Si (111) PD with a relatively large 100 mm2 active area, a high responsivity of 17.4 A/W, a high specific detectivity of 1.23 × 1013 Jones, and fast response speeds of 13.2/13.7 μs (20 kHz) under a UV light of 355 nm at zero bias voltage. The results show that the thin graphene acts as a perfect interface for GaN NRs, encouraging growth with minimum defects on the Si substrate. Our results suggest that the GaN NR/graphene/Si (111) heterojunction has a range of interesting properties that make it well-suited for a variety of photodetection applications.