Detectivity of plasmonic enhanced photodetectors based on nondegenerate two-photon absorption process

Mid-infrared photodetectors are the subject of many research efforts within the last two decades for enhancing their operating parameters such as temperature stability, detectivity and quantum efficiency. This is due to their wide range of applications like biosensing, night vision, and short range communication. However, mid-infrared photons have much smaller energy compared with the band gap energy of well known semiconductors including III-V and II-VI families. One way to overcome this problem is to utilizing quantum confinement effects by absorbing a photon through the intersubband transition of a conduction electron or valance hole. Fabricating devices at the nanoscale size to achieve quantum confinement is costly and imposes limitations for further device preparation. In addition, the optical properties of quantum confined devices are sensitive to nanoscale geometrical parameters which make them vulnerable to fabrication imperfections. The other approach of detecting mid-infrared light is by exploiting the non-degenerate two photon absorption process (TPA). Two photons with different energies can be absorbed simultaneously by a semiconductor with the band gap energy less than the overall energy of two photons. Thus, a mid-infrared photon as the signal can be detected by a bulk semiconductor with much larger band gap energy when a near-infrared photon as the gate assists the absorption process through TPA.