Facile growth and characterization of freestanding single crystal PbI2 film

In this letter, we report a successful facile growth of freestanding single crystals PbI2 (FSC-PbI2) film via hydrothermal method without additives. The properties of samples were investigated by SEM, X-ray diffraction and UV-vis spectroscopy. The result shows that FSC-PbI2 film is a wide band gap semiconductor material (2.38 eV) with 2H type. Moreover, the FSC-PbI2 film based photodetector was also fabricated, and the photodetector respond to x-ray incident light with a fast, repeatable and stable response characterized by a reasonable response and decay times (0.26 s and 0.43 s, respectively). These results substantiate the potential of FSC-PbI2 film as a candidate material in optoelectronic applications.