The demand for miniature, low-cost, utmost efficient optical absorbers triggered ongoing research efforts to minimize the overall design thickness, particularly the photo-active layer, while still maintaining a high optical absorptance....

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We propose a novel concept of designing silicon photonics metamaterials for perfect near-infrared light absorption. The study’s emphasis is an in-depth investigation of various physical mechanisms behind the ∼ 100 % ultra-narrowband record peak absorptance of the designed structures, comprising an ultrathin silicon absorber. The electromagnetic power transport, described by the Poynting vector, is innovatively explored, which shows combined vortex and crossed-junction two-dimensional waveguide-like flows as outcomes of optical field singularities. These flows, though peculiar for each of the designed structures, turn out to be key factors of the perfect resonant optical absorption. The electromagnetic fields show tight two-dimensional confinement: a sharp vertical confinement of the resonant-cavity type combined with a lateral metasurface supported confinement. The silicon-absorbing layer and its oxide environment are confined between two subwavelength metasurfaces such that the entire design is well compatible with silicon-on-insulator microelectronics. The design concept and its outcomes meet the extensive challenges of ultrathin absorbers for minimum noise and an ultra-narrowband absorptance spectrum, while maintaining an overall very thin structure for planar integration. With these materials and such objectives, the proposed designs seem essential, as standard approaches fail, mainly due to a very low silicon absorption coefficient over the near-infrared range. Tolerance tests for fabrication errors show fair tolerability while maintaining a high absorptance peak, along with a controllable deviation off the central-design wavelength. Various applications are suggested and analyzed, which include but are not limited to: efficient photodetectors for focal plane array and on-chip integrated silicon photonics, high-precision spectroscopic chemical and angular-position sensing, and wavelength-division multiplexing.

Resonant cavity-assisted enhancement of optical absorption was a photodetector designing concept emerged about two and half decades ago, which responded to the challenge of thinning the photoactive layer while outperforming the efficiency of the monolithic photodetector. However, for many relevant materials, meeting that challenge with such a design requires unrealistically many layer deposition steps, so that the efficiency at goal hardly becomes attainable because of inevitable fabrication faults. Under this circumstance, we suggest a new approach for designing photodetectors with absorber layer as thin as that in respective resonant cavity enhanced ones, but concurrently, the overall detector thickness being much thinner, and topmost performing. The proposed structures also contain the cavity-absorber arrangement but enclose the cavity by two dielectric one-dimensional grating-on-layer structures with the same grating pitch, instead of the distributed Bragg reflectors typical of the resonant cavity enhancement approach. By design based on the in-house software, the theoretical feasibility of such ∼ 7.0µm − 8.5µm thick structures with ∼ 100% efficiency for a linearly polarized (TE or TM) mid-infrared range radiation is demonstrated. Moreover, the tolerances of the designed structures' performance against the gratings' fabrication errors are tested, and fair manufacturing tolerance while still maintaining high peak efficiency along with a small deviation of its spectral position off initially predefined central-design wavelength is proved. In addition, the electromagnetic fields amplitudes and Poynting verctor over the cavity-absorber area are visualized. As a result, it is inferred that the electromagnetic fields' confinement in the designed structure, which is a key to their upmost efficiency, is two-dimensional combining in-depth vertical resonant-cavity like confinement, with the lateral microcavity like one set by the presence of gratings.

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