Controlled and tunable growth of ambient stable 2D PtS2 thin film and its high-performance broadband photodetectors

PtS2, a group-10 transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC), has recently attracted enormous interest owing to its tunable band gap (0.25–1.6 eV), high carrier mobility, and large current on-off ratio of the devices. In contrast to other TMDCs, the growth of PtS2 is more difficult, partly due to the nobility of Pt and partly due to the easier formation of the more stable PtS phase rather than PtS2. Herein, we investigate the effect of critical growth parameters like sulfur amount, Pt thickness and gas flow rate for the control and large area growth of PtS2 via thermal assisted conversion process in atmospheric chemical vapour deposition. The detailed characterization using Raman and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) suggests a controlled transition from PtS to PtS2, which can be obtained by fine tuning of these growth parameters. Furthermore, the optimized growth condition of PtS2 is highly reproducible and can be grown on varieties of substrates like SiO2/Si, sapphire, p-type Si, and even on flexible mica substrate. Finally, a high-performance PtS2 photodetector (PD) was fabricated on different substrates. The PD fabricated on SiO2/Si substrate with a detection range covering from visible to NIR region (400–1100 nm) showed a high responsivity and detectivity of 31.38 AW-1 and 3.92 × 1013 Jones, respectively, under 900 nm illumination at a low bias of 1 V. This work demonstrates an effective approach to control the growth of PtS2 on varieties of substrate for high-performance next-generation photodetector for NIR photodetection applications.