Plasmonic Enhanced Infrared Detection with a Dynamic Hyper-Spectral Tuning.

摘要

This project investigated the properties of metallic two dimensional hole arrays and their properties in relation to coupling semiconductor quantum dots for enhanced functionality and performance of infrared sensors. Current technologies in infrared sensing use bulk materials which require cooling for high performance operation and use expensive optics for sensing color information in the infrared. The integration of metallic arrays with these detectors is expected to improve their sensitivity significantly. Performance mechanisms of the coupling of incident light to the hole arrays and the coupling between hole arrays and quantum dots were studied and analyzed. Over an order of magnitude improvement in the sensitivity of devices were reported as a result of integration of metallic hole arrays. In addition improved techniques were demonstrated for accurate characterization of sensitivity and performance enhancement in these devices. The strong enhancement was found to be a result of operation of the device near the strong light-matter coupling regime. The processes developed for integration have a high reliability and can be transferred into arrays with minimal disruption of present day technology while significantly improving performance.