Low-donor content approach to achieve sensitive narrowband organic photodetectors

Narrowband near-infrared (NIR) detectors are key components for various modern biomedical, agricultural, astronomical sensing as well as monitoring applications. Typically, a narrowband organic photodetector (OPD) requires thick junctions or additional optical elements, which are either tedious or cost-ineffective. Here, we adopt the low-donor content strategy in our thin-film device to realize narrowband spectral features. The much-mitigated aggregation drastically improves shunt resistance and dark current while maintaining decent photocurrent. Upon further dilution, a thinner electron transporting layer can effectively shorten the transient response to reach fast speed. n-i-p and p-i-n device configurations are also compared, which exhibits drastic changes for low-donor content OPDs. The 5 wt% D:A thin-film bulk-heterojunction OPD presents an external quantum efficiency of 49.3% at 770 nm with zero bias, and a high thermal-noise calculated specific detectivity (D*) of 1.0 × 1013 Jones (7.1 × 1012 Jones based on noise spectral density) at 0 V. Such narrowband OPD also shows a fast NIR response of 530 ns/840 ns (rise/fall) when operated at 10 kHz. The results reveal the potential for low-donor-content blend in realizing narrowband photodetection.