We thank Felix Carrascoso (ICMM-CSIC) for support with the metal evaporation and Hao Li (ICMM-CSIC) for his help preparing some of the schemes for the figures. This work received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement n° 755655, ERC-StG 2017 project 2D-TOPSENSE), the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Spain) through the project PID2020-115566RB-I00. A. C-G. AMA-E and AN extend their sincere appreciation to the Distinguished Scientist Fellowship Program (DSFP) at King Saud University for funding of this work. Y. Xie acknowledges support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant No. 61704129 and No. 62011530438, and the Key Research and Development Program of Shaanxi (Program No. 2021KW-02) and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (JB211409). W. L. Zhang acknowledges the grant from China Scholarship Council (CSC) under No. 201908610178. Onur Çakıroğlu acknowledges the support from European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the grant agreement 956813 (2Exciting).

Paper-based devices have attracted extensive attention due to the growing demand for disposable flexible electronics. Herein, we integrate semiconducting devices on cellulose paper substrate through a simple abrasion technique that yields high-performance photodetectors. A solvent-free WS2 film deposited on paper favors an effective electron-hole separation and hampers recombination. The as-prepared paper-based WS2 photodetectors exhibit a sensitive photore-sponse over a wide spectral range spanning from ultraviolet (365 nm) to near-infrared (940 nm). Their responsivity value reaches up to ~270 mA W−1 at 35 V under a power density of 35 mW cm−2. A high performance photodetector was achieved by controlling the environmental exposure as the ambient oxygen molecules were found to decrease the photoresponse and stability of the WS2 photodetector. Furthermore, we have built a spectrometer using such a paper-based WS2 device as the photodetecting component to illustrate its potential application. The present work could pro-mote the development of cost-effective disposable photodetection devices. © The Author(s) 2023.

Supplementary information for Solvent-free fabrication of broadband WS2 photodetectors on paper; Supplementary video S1

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