Abstract
Terahertz (THz) photodetectors have attracted great attention from scientists worldwide for their application in security checking, biomedical treatment and astronomical observation of remote stars and distant galaxies. As a typical THz detector, extrinsic GaAs based photoconductive detector is facing critical technical bottlenecks in the epitaxial growth of sufficiently thick and high-quality GaAs absorption layer. In this work, a novel THz photoconductive detector based on metamaterial/GaAs/electrode layer hybrid structure was designed and simulated. By setting the periodic split ring resonator (SRR) structure as 88 μm pitch with 8 μm width, the absorption peaks exist at the wavelength of about 142 and 367 μm, which originate from the resonant cavity and the SRR dipole resonance effect, and the novel device shows a significant enhancement compared with the conventional GaAs photoconductive detector. Thus, the necessary thickness of GaAs absorption-layer is largely reduced, and the resonant absorption peak can be modulated by changing the thickness of absorption layer. This work provides a novel device structure which can solve the critical epitaxial growth bottleneck of GaAs photoconductive detector and used for the astronomical observation, security check, etc.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61705201, and 61404120), Shanghai Rising-Star Program (Grant No. 17QB1403900), Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by CAST (Grant No. 2018QNRC001), Shanghai Sailing Program (Grant No. 17YF1418100), and Shanghai Youth Top-Notch Talent Development Program.
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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Numerical Simulation of Optoelectronic Devices, NUSOD’ 18.
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Chen, Y., Yang, X., Tong, W. et al. The simulation on absorption properties of metamaterial/GaAs/electrode layer hybrid structure based Terahertz photoconductive detector. Opt Quant Electron 51, 118 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11082-019-1834-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11082-019-1834-8