Exploring the promising properties of 2D exfoliated black phosphorus for optoelectronic applications under 1.55 μm optical excitation

A great interest has been lately initiated in the optoelectronics field for 2D materials with a tunable bandgap. Being able to choose the bandgap of a material is a huge progress in optoelectronics, since it would permit to overcome the limitation imposed by the graphene lack of energy bandgap, but also the restriction imposed by already used semiconductor whose bandgap are fixed and cannot apply for IR-NIR applications. From DFT simulations predictions, Black Phosphorus (bP) becomes a bidimensional semiconducting material with a direct tunable energy bandgap from 0.3 eV to 2 eV by controlling number of layers. This material also has a picosecond carrier response and exceptional mobilities under external excitation. Hence black phosphorus is a promising 2D material candidate for photoconductive switching under a NIR optical excitation as in telecommunication wavelength range of 1.55 μm. In this paper, material electromagnetic properties analysis is described in a large frequency band from optical to microwave measurements executed on different samples allowing energy bandgap and work function dependency to fabrication techniques, anisotropy and multiscale optoelectronic device realization by switch contact engineering and material passivation or encapsulation. Material implementation in microwave devices opens the route to new broadband electronic functionalities triggered by optics, thanks to light/matter extreme confinement degree. In this paper we present fabrication method of bP based microwave photoconductive switch, with a focus on black phosphorus Raman characterization, and obtained performances.