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A Spectrally Tunable Plasmonic Photosensor with an Ultrathin Semiconductor Region

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Abstract

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) has been widely utilized to improve the absorption performance in the photosensors. Graphene has emerged as a promising plasmonic material, which supports tunable SPR and shows significant flexibility over metals. In this letter, a hybrid photosensor based on the integration of periodic cross-shaped graphene arrays with an ultrathin light-absorbing semiconductor is proposed. A tenfold absorption enhancement over a large range of the incidence angle for both light polarizations as well as a considerably high photogeneration rate (∼ 1037) is demonstrated at the resonance. Compared with traditional metal-based plasmon-enhanced photosensors, the absorption enhancement here can be expediently tuned with manipulating the Fermi energy of graphene. The proposed photosensor can amplify the photoresponse to the incidence light at the selected wavelength and thus be utilized in photosensing with high efficiency and tunable spectral selectivity in the mid-infrared (mid-IR) and terahertz (THz) regime.

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Acknowledgments

The author Shuyuan Xiao (SYXIAO) expresses his deepest gratitude to his Ph.D. advisor Tao Wang for providing guidance during this project. SYXIAO would also like to thank Prof. Jianfa Zhang (National University of Defense Technology) for his guidance to the modeling of the light-absorbing semiconductor and Dr. Qi Lin (Hunan Univerisity) for beneficial discussion on graphene optical properties. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61376055, 61006045 and 11647122), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (HUST: 2016YXMS024) and the Project of Hubei Provincial Department of Education (Grant No. B2016178).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, People’s Republic of China

    Shuyuan Xiao, Tao Wang & Xiaoyun Jiang

  2. School of Physics and Electronic-information Engineering, Hubei Engineering University, Xiaogan, 432000, People’s Republic of China

    Boyun Wang

  3. Department of Physics, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, 88001, USA

    Chen Xu

Authors
  1. Shuyuan Xiao
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  2. Tao Wang
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  3. Xiaoyun Jiang
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  4. Boyun Wang
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  5. Chen Xu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Tao Wang.

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Xiao, S., Wang, T., Jiang, X. et al. A Spectrally Tunable Plasmonic Photosensor with an Ultrathin Semiconductor Region. Plasmonics 13, 897–902 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11468-017-0586-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11468-017-0586-1

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