The environmental stability of the layered semiconductor black phosphorus
(bP) remains a challenge. Passivation of the bP surface with phosphorus oxide,
POx, grown by a reactive ion etch with oxygen plasma is known to improve
photoluminescence efficiency of exfoliated bP flakes. We apply phosphorus oxide
passivation in the fabrication of bP field effect transistors using a gate
stack consisting of a POx layer grown by reactive ion etching followed by
atomic layer deposition of Al2O3. We observe room temperature top-gate
mobilities of 115 cm2/Vs in ambient conditions, which we attribute to the low
defect density of the bP/POx interface