Topological insulators have shown great potential for future optoelectronic technology due to their extraordinary optical and electrical properties. Photodetectors, as one of the most widely used optoelectronic devices, are crucial for sensing, imaging, communication, and optical computing systems to convert optical signals to electrical signals. Here we experimentally show a novel combination of topological insulators (TIs) and transition metal chalcogenides (TMDs) based self-powered photodetectors with ultra-low dark current and high sensitivity. The photodetector formed by a MoS2/Sb2Te3 heterogeneous junction exhibits a low dark current of 2.4 pA at zero bias and 1.2 nA at 1V. It shows a high photoresponsivity of >150 mA W−1 at zero bias and rectification of 3 times at an externally applied bias voltage of 1V. The excellent performance of the proposed photodetector with its innovative material combination of TMDs and TIs paves the way for the development of novel high-performance optoelectronic devices. The TIs/TMDs transfer used to form the heterojunction is simple to incorporate into on-chip waveguide systems, enabling future applications on highly integrated photonic circuits.
Advancements in nanophotonics have raised the bar for optoelectronic devices, demanding ultra-compact size, fast speeds, high efficiency, and low energy consumption. Emerging materials hold the potential to meet these demands, enabling the creation of high-performing optoelectronic devices. We present our latest breakthroughs and demonstrate device prototypes made from various materials, pushing the boundaries of optoelectronic performance.
Electro-optic modulators provide a key function in optical transceivers and increasingly in photonic programmable application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for machine learning and signal processing. However, both foundry-ready silicon-based modulators and conventional material-based devices utilizing lithium-niobate fall short in simultaneously providing high chip packaging density and fast speed. Current-driven ITO-based modulators have the potential to achieve both enabled by efficient light–matter interactions. Here, we introduce micrometer-compact Mach–Zehnder interferometer (MZI)-based modulators capable of exceeding 100 GHz switching rates. Integrating ITO-thin films atop a photonic waveguide, one can achieve an efficient
V
π
L
${V}_{\pi }L$
= 0.1 V mm, spectrally broadband, and compact MZI phase shifter. Remarkably, this allows integrating more than 3500 of these modulators within the same chip area as only one single silicon MZI modulator. The modulator design introduced here features a holistic photonic, electronic, and RF-based optimization and includes an asymmetric MZI tuning step to optimize the extinction ratio (ER)-to-insertion loss (IL) and dielectric thickness sweep to balance the trade-offs between ER and speed. Driven by CMOS compatible bias voltage levels, this device is the first to address next-generation modulator demands for processors of the machine intelligence revolution, in addition to the edge and cloud computing demands as well as optical transceivers alike.
Solving mathematical equations faster and more efficiently has been a Holy Grail for centuries for scientists and engineers across all disciplines. While electronic digital circuits have revolutionized equation solving in recent decades, it has become apparent that performance gains from brute-force approaches of compute-solvers are quickly saturating over time. Instead, paradigms that leverage the universes' natural tendency to minimize a system's free energy, such as annealers or Ising Machines, are being sought after due to favorable complexity scaling. Here we introduce a programmable analog solver leveraging the mathematical formal equivalence between Maxwell's equations and photonic circuitry. It features a mesh network of nanophotonic beams to find
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