Elemental sulfur (S8) is an abundant byproduct of the petroleum refining process, contributing to the “excess sulfur problem” due to its limited applications. Utilizing sulfur as a valuable resource offers a dual benefit: addressing environmental issues associated with sulfur waste and providing cost-effective pathways to convert this sulfur into quality material-based applications. An effective method for directly converting sulfur as a feedstock to create a polymeric material is called inverse vulcanization. In this work, waste sulfur was used as a polymer feedstock to synthesize sulfur-enriched polymer (SEP) via the inverse vulcanization method and used as the semiconducting material of a photodetector device. Here, bulk sulfur copolymerized with the vinylic monomer 1,3-diisopropenylbenzene (1,3-DIB) has been used to form a thermochemically stable SEP. This synthesized SEP has been utilized to fabricate a visible light photodetector. A thin ZnO layer was introduced as the electron transport layer to facilitate efficient charge extraction and improve the overall device performance. The external quantum efficiency (EQE) data reveal that the intense photocurrent generation in the device originates from the absorption region of the SEP, confirming that most of the photocurrent is generated by the SEP polymer thin film. Furthermore, the fabricated device exhibits a detectivity of ∼6.5 × 1011 Jones (at 430 nm) with a response time of ∼60 ms.
Majhi et al. (Tue,) studied this question.