Dark Current in Broadband Perovskite–Organic Heterojunction Photodetectors Controlled by Interfacial Energy Band Offset

Lead halide perovskite and organic semiconductors are promising classes of materials for photodetector (PD) applications. State-of-the-art perovskite PDs have performance metrics exceeding silicon PDs in the visible. While organic semiconductors offer bandgap tunability due to their chemical design with detection extended into the near-infrared (NIR), perovskites are limited to the visible band and the first fraction of the NIR spectrum. In this work, perovskite–organic heterojunction (POH) PDs with absorption up to 950 nm are designed by the dual contribution of perovskite and the donor:acceptor bulk-heterojunction (BHJ), without any intermediate layer. The effect of the energetics of the donor materials is systematically studied on the dark current (J _d) of the device by using the PBDB-T polymer family. Combining the experimental results with drift-diffusion simulations, it is shown that J _d in POH devices is limited by thermal generation via deep trap states in the BHJ. Thus, the best performance is obtained for the PM7-based POH, which delivers an ultra-low noise current of 2 × 10 ⁻¹⁴ A Hz ^−1/2 and high specific detectivity of 4.7 × 10 ¹² Jones in the NIR. Last, the application of the PM7-based POH devices as NIR pulse oximeter with high-accuracy heartbeat monitoring at long-distance of 2 meters is demonstrated.