Intrinsically healing conducting polymer/hydrogel nanocomposite films and their novel volumetric channel for high-performance, flexible, and healable organic phototransistors

The flexible organic phototransistors (OPTs) are crucial for next-generation wearable systems for applications where large mechanical deformation is involved. However, most of the reported OPTs utilizing the field-effect transistor (FET) architecture suffer from undesired mechanical flexibility and limited performance due to their interfacial charge transport and inherently low transconductance; moreover, their pi-conjugated semiconductor polymers that serve as channels lack specific healing sites, making it difficult to intrinsically heal themselves. Herein, a more flexible and high-performance OPT with enhanced interfacial charge transport via novel volumetric channel and strong healing capability is developed for the first time. This OPT utilizes an organic electrochemical transistor architecture that consists of intrinsically healing conducting polymer/hydrogel composite films with three-dimensional volumetric channels. Such devices not only efficiently restore their mechanical and electrical performance in 100 ms after undergoing severe damage but also exhibit excellent mechanical flexibility without obviously degraded performance. More importantly, the self-healing OPTs exhibit high performance with a responsivity as high as 1.01 x 10(5) A W-1, detectivity of 1.75 x 10(12) Jones, and high external quantum efficiency of 3.03 x 104%, higher than those of the majority of the reported FET-based OPTs. All of these results indicate that these novel and intrinsically self-healing OPTs with volumetric channels are ideal for use in next-generation wearable devices.