Recently, Professor Gang Cheng’s group has made new progress in floating ion gate regulation of Cd(OH)2@ZnO nanowire thin-film transistors and ultraviolet detectors. The related results of "Cd(OH)2@ZnO nanowires thin-film "transistor and UV photodetector with a floating ionic gate tuned by a triboelectric nanogenerator" are published in the famous international publication Nano Energy (IF=15.548, JCR District).

Article link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nanoen.2020.104808

The nanomaterials with high specific surface area can adsorb gas ions, such as O2-, etc., which play an important role in regulating the electrical and photoelectric properties of nanomaterials as a floating gate. Therefore, we proposed the "Surface Ion Grid (SIG)" technology based on the triboelectronic nanogenerator (TENG). The previous research results have proved that the SIG technology can regulate the photoelectric characteristics by gas ion adsorption on semiconductor as a floating gate to, whether the one-dimensional ZnO nanowires or two-dimensional MoS2 films.

In this paper, Cd(OH)2@ZnO nanowire thin film transistors (TFT) were fabricated on comb-shaped electrodes by atomic layer deposition (ALD), and Cd(OH)2 nanowires were used as the “framework” to fabricate large specific surface area and high Sensitive ZnO thin film photodetector (TFP). For the TET, the current can be gradually tuned by the control of the TENG duty cycle, and the maximum on-off ratio of the current reaches 4.0×105. For the UV TFP, the switching ratio and recovery time constant of photocurrent reached 2.7×107 and 0.53s, respectively. The sensitivity and recovery speed were increased by 1350 times and 946 times, respectively. Due to the low cost and easy operation of TENG, the floating ion gate technology based on TENG provides new and effective strategy for the development of new types of electronic and optoelectronic nanodevices with high performance by constructing a device system.

Master student Zheng Mingli is the first author of this article. Professor Cheng Gang and Professor Du Zuliang are the co-corresponding authors of this article. This work was supported by funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Science and Technology Department of Henan Province, and Henan University.

Figure 1. Schematic diagram of the UV photodetector with a floating ionic gate tuned by a triboelectric nanogenerator