Piezo-phototronic effect enhanced polarization-sensitive photodetectors based on cation-mixed organic–inorganic perovskite nanowires

Abstract: Piezo-phototronic effect has been extensively investigated for the third generation semiconductor nanowires. Here, we present a demonstration that piezo-phototronic effect can even be applied to tune polarization-sensitive photodetectors based on cation-mixed organic–inorganic perovskite nanowires. A big anisotropic photoluminescence (PL) with linearly polarized light-excitation was found due to a strong spontaneous piezoelectric polarization besides the anisotropic crystal structure and morphology. The piezo-phototronic effect was utilized to tune the PL intensity, and an improved anisotropic PL ratio from 9.36 to 10.21 for linearly polarized light-excitation was obtained thanks to the modulation by piezo-potential. And a circularly polarization-sensitive PL characterized with circular dichroism ratio was also discovered, which was found to be modulated from 0.085 to 0.555 (with a 5.5-fold improvement) within the range of applied strain. The circular dichroism was resulted from the joint effects of the modulated Rashba spin–orbit coupling and the asymmetric carriers separation and recombination for right- and left-handed helicity due to the presence of effective piezo-potential. These findings not only reveal the promising optoelectronic applications of piezo-phototronic effect in perovskite-based polarization-sensitive photodetectors, but also illuminate fundamental understandings of their polarization properties of perovskite nanowires.