Spray-coating of AgI incorporated metal halide perovskites for high-performance X-ray detection

Metal halide perovskites have emerged as a promising candidate for ionizing radiation detection, thanks to the facile fabrication, excellent optoelectronic properties and high attenuation coefficient. In order to fully absorb the incident X-ray photons, X-ray detectors require relatively thick active layers. However, it is challenging to obtain thick perovskite films based on conventional solution-based techniques, due to the limited solubility and viscosity of the perovskite precursors. In this work, we introduced spray-coating to deposit perovskite films on various substrates, and achieved tunable and thick films. On the other hand, the charge transport is another issue limiting the device performance of perovskite X-ray detectors. Compared with conventional inorganic semiconductors, hybrid perovskites possess relatively poor charge carrier mobility and lifetime. To address this issue, we incorporate AgI within the perovskite precursor, and systematically investigated their optoelectronic properties. It was found that the optimized AgI incorporated perovskite films exhibited the highest mobility-lifetime product, resulted X-ray sensitivity up to 3433 μGyair−1 cm−2 and ultra-low detection limit of 3.5 nGyair s−1, suggesting great potential for X-ray detection.