A self-powered photodetector based on the C2P4 monolayer

Abstract

In this paper, we proposed a self-powered photodetector driven by the photogalvanic effect based on the predicted C2P4 monolayer which has excellent electronic and mechanical properties. We focused on the tuning of photogalvanic effect by creating vacancy-defects and substitution doping using the DFT combined with Keldysh nonequilibrium green’s function formalism. We found that the photocurrents produced by the photogalvanic effect mainly show cosine dependence on the polarization angle of incident light, and the vacancy-defects and substitution-doping can increase the magnitude of photocurrents, corresponding to the enhancement of photogalvanic effect in the C2P4 photodetector. Moreover, the C2P4 photodetector possesses high extinction ratio, showing it is highly desirable for polarization detection applications. Our work reveals promising applications of the C2P4 monolayer for self-powered and low energy-consumption photogalvanic effect driven optoelectronics devices.