Room temperature single nanowire ZnTe photoconductors grown by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition

Abstract

Single nanowire ZnTe photoconductors prepared by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition are presented. These photodetectors exhibit the highest reported visible responsivity of 360 A/W (at 530 nm) and gain of 8640 (at 3 V bias). The high gain reflects a long carrier lifetime (i.e., ∼1 μs) and the role of fast selective trapping of one carrier is presented to explain this. These results reveal that such single ZnTe nanowires are excellent candidates for applications requiring high performance visible nanoscale photoconductive detectors.