Multi-time scale photoelectric behavior in facile fabricated transparent and flexible silicon nanowires aerogel membrane

In recent years, transparent and flexible materials have been widely pursued in electronics and optoelectronics fields for usage as planar electrodes, energy conversion components and sensing units. As the most widely applied semiconductor material, the related progress in silicon is of great significance although with large difficulty. Herein, we report a one-step method to achieve flexible and transparent silicon nanowires aerogel membrane. A competitive carrier kinetics involving interfacial trapped carriers and the valence electrons transition is demonstrated, according to the photoelectric performance of a sandwiched graphene/silicon nanowires membrane/Al device, i.e., rapidly positive photoresponse dominated by laser excited free-carriers generation (~ 500 ms) and subsequent slow negative photocurrent evolution due to laser heating involved multi-levels process (> 10 s). These results contribute to fabrication of silicon nanowire self-assembly structures and also the exploration of their optoelectrical properties in flexible and transparent devices.