Metallic nanostructures can be designed to operate effectively as a coupling structure for incident beams to surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs). On a semiconductor, metal nanostructures can act simultaneously as a device electrode while ensuring strong optical field overlap with the active region. Additionally, SPP fields can be confined to sub-wavelength dimensions and significantly enhanced relative to the exciting field. These features are very attractive for nano-scale optoelectronic devices such as photodetectors as the excitation of SPPs alters conventional trade-offs between responsivity and speed respectively. This is due to the facts that sub-wavelength confinement enables the active region to be shrunk to nano-scale dimensions yet good optoelectronic performance can be maintained due to the SPP field enhancement. In this paper we discuss recent progress on surface plasmon enhanced photodetectors.

Date Published: 25 September 2014
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 9288, Photonics North 2014, 928819 (25 September 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2081400

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9288:
Photonics North 2014
Steve MacLean; David V. Plant, Editor(s)