Growth of uniformly doped black phosphorus films through versatile atomic substitution

For the emerging excellent two-dimensional semiconductor black phosphorus (BP), doping has been proven as an effective way to tune its intrinsic properties. For the further development and expansion of BP-based research and application, the direct growth of doped BP films is highly desirable but still remains a challenge. In this work, the direct growth of uniformly doped-BP films on silicon substrates is achieved by a simple one-step vapor growth. The proposed decoupled feeding strategy significantly improves the effectiveness of doping and enables uniform dopant distribution in the grown films. The substitutional doping nature and high crystal quality of the grown doped films are confirmed by microscopy and crystal structural determination. Electrical transport measurement results reveal that Se and Te dopants perform mild electron doping effect and enable improve the electron mobility relative to pristine BP, while As dopant performs mild hole doping effect. It is believed that the direct growth of doped BP films in this work will facilitate the research development of BP in electronics and optoelectronics.