Probing photoelectrical transport in lead halide perovskites with van der Waals contacts

Lead halide perovskites have attracted increasing interest for their exciting potential in diverse optoelectronic devices. However, their charge transport properties remain elusive, plagued by the issues of excessive contact resistance and large hysteresis in ambient conditions. Here we report a van der Waals integration approach for creating high-performance contacts on monocrystalline halide perovskite thin films with minimum interfacial damage and an atomically clean interface. Compared to the deposited contacts, our van der Waals contacts exhibit two to three orders of magnitude lower contact resistance, enabling systematic transport studies in a wide temperature range. We report a Hall mobility exceeding 2,000 cm2 V–1 s–1 at around 80 K, an ultralow bimolecular recombination coefficient of 3.5 × 10–15 cm3 s–1 and a photocurrent gain >106 in the perovskite thin films. Furthermore, magnetotransport studies reveal a quantum-interference-induced weak localization behaviour with a phase coherence length up to 49 nm at 3.5 K. Our results lay the foundation for exploring new physics in this class of ‘soft-lattice’ materials. The realization of high-quality van der Waals contacts on monocrystalline halide perovskite thin films enables the probing of their long-range carrier and photocarrier transport properties.