Review on metal sulfide-based nanostructures for photodetectors: From ultraviolet to infrared regions

Nanostructured metal sulfides are the potential materials for the development of highly efficient photodetectors, attributed to their easily tunable physical, chemical, optical, and electronic properties. Especially, nanostructured arrays based on binary metal sulfides like ZnS, MoS2, CdS, SnS, WS2, PbS, and TiS3 with a strong light-matter interaction have sparked the interest of researchers as photosensor materials. This review provides the complete insight on the research progress of photodetectors based on nanostructured metal sulfide films, which are classified into three categories such as ultraviolet (UV), visible, and infrared (IR) photodetectors. Initially, the fundamentals of photodetectors with various figures of merit are discussed. For UV photodetection, the wide bandgap metal sulfides such as ZnS and SnS2 based devices are mostly reported. In case of visible photodetectors, CdS, WS2, and MoS2 based materials and their heterostructures are widely experimented towards the efficient photodetection. Finally, narrow bandgap and high surface-area to volume ratio quantum dot metal sulfides such as PbS, TiS3, and SnS based devices are reviewed for IR photodetection. Herein, to benchmark the device performance, the comparison of the standard figures of merit such as responsivity, detectivity, external quantum efficiency, and response time for various reported literature are carried out. Among all metal sulfide-based photodetectors, ZnS/graphene heterostructure, ReS2-based photodetector, and PbS/graphene-based phototransistor have higher device characteristics under UV, visible, and IR illumination, respectively. To conclude, the review has been completed with the summary of the recent progress and future aspects for next generation photodetector devices.