High sensitivity of room-temperature terahertz photodetector based on silicon

Qinxi Qiu; Wanli Ma; Jingbo Li; Lin Jiang; Wangchen Mao; Xuehui Lu; Niangjuan Yao; Yi Shi; Zhiming Huang

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.105217

High sensitivity of room-temperature terahertz photodetector based on silicon

iScience. 2022 Sep 26;25(10):105217. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.105217. eCollection 2022 Oct 21.

Authors

Qinxi Qiu^{1

2}, Wanli Ma^{1

2}, Jingbo Li^{1

2}, Lin Jiang¹, Wangchen Mao^{1

2}, Xuehui Lu³, Niangjuan Yao¹, Yi Shi¹, Zhiming Huang^{1

2

4

5

6}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Infrared Physics, Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 500 Yu Tian Road, Shanghai 200083, P. R. China.
² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 19 Yu Quan Road, Beijing 100049, P. R. China.
³ Key Laboratory of Polar Materials and Devices, Department of Electronic Engineering East China Normal University, 500 Dong Chuan Road, Shanghai 200241, P. R. China.
⁴ Key Laboratory of Space Active Opto-Electronics Technology, Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 500 Yu Tian Road, Shanghai 200083, P. R. China.
⁵ Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 1 Sub-Lane Xiangshan, Hangzhou 310024, P. R. China.
⁶ Institute of Optoelectronics, Fudan University, 2005 Song Hu Road, Shanghai 200438, P. R. China.

Abstract

Silicon (Si) is the most important semiconductor material broadly used in both electronics and optoelectronics. However, the performance of Si-based room temperature detectors is far below the requirements for direct detection in the terahertz (THz) band, a very promising electromagnetic band for the next-generation technology. Here, we report a high sensitivity of room temperature THz photodetector utilizing the electromagnetic induced well mechanism with an SOI-based structure for easy integration. The detector achieves a responsivity of 122 kV W^-1, noise equivalent power (NEP) of 0.16 pW Hz^-1/2, and a fast response of 1.29 μs at room temperature. The acquired NEP of the detector is ∼2 orders lower in magnitude than that of other types of Si-based detectors. Our results pave the way to realize Si-based THz focal plane arrays, which can be used in a wide range of applications, such as medical diagnosis, remote sensing, and security inspection.

Keywords: Radiation physics; devices; engineering.