Plasmonic materials, and their ability to enable strong concentration of optical fields, have offered a tantalizing foundation for the demonstration of sub-diffraction-limit photonic devices. However, practical and scalable plasmonic optoelectronics for real world applications remain elusive. In this work, we present an infrared photodetector leveraging a device architecture consisting of a “designer” epitaxial plasmonic metal integrated with a quantum-engineered detector structure, all in a mature III-V semiconductor material system. Incident light is coupled into surface plasmon-polariton modes at the detector/designer metal interface, and the strong confinement of these modes allows for a sub-diffractive ( ∼ λ 0 / 33 ) detector absorber layer thickness, effectively decoupling the detector’s absorption efficiency and dark current. We demonstrate high-performance detectors operating at non-cryogenic temperatures ( T = 195 K ), without sacrificing external quantum efficiency, and superior to well-established and commercially available detectors. This work provides a practical and scalable plasmonic optoelectronic device architecture with real world mid-infrared applications.
Infrared detectors using monolithically integrated doped semiconductor "designer metals" are proposed and experimentally demonstrated. We leverage the "designer metal" groundplanes to form resonant cavities with enhanced absorption tuned across the long-wave infrared (LWIR). Detectors are designed with two target absorption enhancement wavelengths: 8 and 10 μm. The core of our detectors are quantumengineered LWIR type-II superlattice p-i-n detectors with total thicknesses of only 1.42 and 1.80 μm for the 8 and 10 μm absorption enhancement devices, respectively. Our 8 and 10 μm structures show peak external quantum efficiencies of 45 and 27%, which are 4.5× and 2.7× enhanced, respectively, compared to control structures. We demonstrate the clear advantages of this detector architecture, both in terms of ease of growth/fabrication and enhanced device performance. The proposed architecture is absorber-and device-structure agnostic, much thinner than state-of-theart LWIR T2SLs, and offers the opportunity for the integration of low dark current LWIR detector architectures for significant enhancement of IR detectivity.
We propose an architecture for enhanced absorption in ultra-thin strained layer superlattice detectors utilizing a hybrid optical cavity design. Our detector architecture utilizes a designer-metal doped semiconductor ground plane beneath the ultra-subwavelength thickness long-wavelength infrared absorber material, upon which we pattern metallic antenna structures. We demonstrate the potential for near 50% detector absorption in absorber layers with thicknesses of approximately λ0/50, using realistic material parameters. We investigate detector absorption as a function of wavelength and incidence angle, as well as detector geometry. The proposed device architecture offers the potential for high efficiency detectors with minimal growth costs and relaxed design parameters.
We demonstrate room temperature mid-wave infrared detectors with high peak detectivity. Our detector structures consist of type-II superlattice nBn detectors with ultra-thin (∼ 250 nm) absorbers, integrated into an all-epitaxial guidedmode resonance architecture. The resulting devices show strong spectral selectivity, controllable by choice of grating period, and low dark currents. We achieve room temperature peak specific detectivity of D * ≈ 1.2 × 10 10 cm √ Hz/W at a wavelength of λ = 4.4 µm and D * ≈ 1 × 10 10 cm √ Hz/W at a wavelength of λ = 4.7 µm, for grating periods of Λ = 1.6 µm and Λ = 1.8 µm, respectively. The presented all-epitaxial devices offer a unique approach to efficient room temperature mid-wave infrared detection with strong spectral and polarization selectivity.
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