Two-Dimensional Material-Enhanced Flexible and Self-Healable Photodetector for Large-Area Photodetection

Flexible photodetectors are fundamental elements to develop flexible/wearable systems, which can be widely used for in situ health and environmental monitoring, human–machine interacting, flexible displaying, etc. However, the degraded performance or even malfunction under severe mechanical deformation and/or damage remains a key challenge for current flexible photodetectors. In this article, a flexible photodetector is developed with strong self-healing capability and stable performance under large deformation. This photodetector is made of the 2D material self-healing film by mixing 2D materials homogenously with the self-healing polymer of imidazolium-based norbornene polymerized with ionic liquids and counterions. The 2D material self-healing films show enhanced light absorption, and thus, decent photoresponse as compared to the pure self-healing film. The achieved photoresponse remains stable and even increases under small tensile strain within 150%, while decreases slightly under large tensile strain up to 1000%. Moreover, the photodetector not only can be fully recovered from repeated mechanical cuttings, but also presents excellent long-term stability in ambient condition for 500 days without showing any obvious degraded performance. Furthermore, a large-area 2D material self-healing photodetection array is designed with adjustable pixel size, which successfully recognizes the patterns of “T”, “J”, and “U”.