Drastic Improvement in Gas-Sensing Characteristics of Phosphorene Nanosheets under Vacancy Defects and Elemental Functionalization

Abstract

Efficient chemical gas detection is of great importance for various functionalities (such as leakage detection of hazardous and explosive gases in industrial safety systems). The recent discovery of 2D black phosphorene (BlackP) has created intensive interests toward nanosensors because of its maximized surface-to-volume ratio and exceptional carrier mobility that potentially deliver the superior performance than the conventional transition-metal oxides sensors. In this work, we have performed first-principles DFT calculations coupled with the statistical analysis to unravel the structural, electronic, and gas-sensing characteristics of pristine, defected, and metal-substituted BlackP toward toxic H2S and SO2 gas molecules. Our findings have revealed that pristine BlackP weakly interacts with both H2S and SO2 by van der Waals (vdW) forces characterized by the small binding energies. The analysis of electronic properties via the density of states (DOS) indicates that there is a negligible change in DOS aft...