Phosphorene-based nanogenerator powered by cyclic molecular doping

In this work, we propose a novel nanogenerator (NG) powered by cyclically doping phosphorene with ambipolar organic molecules. In the device, we selected Benzyl viologen (BV) as n-type donor and tetracyanoquinodimethane (TCNQ) as p-type acceptor for phosphorene. Using the-art-of-state density functional theory, we systematically explore the electrical properties of the molecularly doped phosphorene. Remarkably, our calculations show that the phosphorene-based device is able to achieve an open-circuit voltage of similar to 2.7 V. Importantly, the output power of this device can be modulated by adjusting the concentration and cyclic frequency of molecular doping. The proposed design is simple and experimentally implementable, and thus promising for applications in clean energy harvesting and solid state lighting. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.