Dielectrophoretic assembly of liquid-phase-exfoliated TiS3 nanoribbons for photodetecting applications

Liquid-phase-exfoliation is a technique capable of producing large quantities of two-dimensional material in suspension. Despite many efforts in the optimization of the exfoliation process itself not much has been done towards the integration of liquid-phase-exfoliated materials in working solid-state devices. In this article, we use dielectrophoresis to direct the assembly of liquid-phase-exfoliated TiS3 nanoribbons between two gold electrodes to produce photodetectors working in the visible. Through electrical and optical measurements we characterize the responsivity of the device and we find values as large as 3.8 mA/W, which improve of more than one order of magnitude on the state-of-the-art for devices based on liquid-phase-exfoliated two-dimensional materials assembled by drop-casting or ink-jet methods.