Organic and Hybrid Photodetectors

Optical Sensors are everywhere in modern life: applications like food quality monitoring, blood-oxygen measurement in conformal wrist bands, or data-driven automated industrial production require sensitive optical detection at various wavelengths. Specifically, organic and hybrid photodetectors (OHPDs) promise excellent opportunities with beneficial properties such as large-area, flexibility or stretchability, transparency, biocompatibility, and low cost. Recent research has not only improved our understanding of device physics and rules for material optimization, but also led to rapid improvement in OHPDs performance, which are now on-par or even better than their inorganic counterparts, such as silicon or indium gallium arsenide photodetectors. For instance, it is possible to directly design OHPDs for specific wavelengths, thus making bulky optical filters obsolete and allowing miniature devices. As another example, intrinsically stretchable, biocompatible/resorbable detectors are possible, enabling completely new medical applications.

In this special issue, the recent progress of OHPDs is systematically summarized by leading research groups in the field, covering all aspects from novel photo-absorbing organic and nanoparticle materials, device physics and architecture. The recent challenges for OHPDs, like achieving high responsivity over tailored spectral regions of the visible and infrared spectral ranges, low electronic noise, high response speed, and high dynamic range are addressed.

Guest Editors: Karl Leo, Canek Fuentes Hernandez, Tomoyuki Yokota, and Gerasimos Konstantatos